Want to join our book club? We’re reading the new Causal Inference Book by Miguel Hernan and James Robins. The book is forthcoming publication by Chapman & Hall/CRC and it is available for FREE right now to download from Harvard. Every few weeks my colleagues and I meet up to discuss a few chapters. We…
A health economist walks into a tech company…
…and learns good practices for reproducible analyses in health economics and outcomes research from software engineers. THE KEYS are functional programming, version control, style guides, and peer code review systems. READ ABOUT IT in the latest Value & Outcomes Spotlight magazine here. LEARN HANDS ON at our short-course Sat, May 18, 8am-Noon at the ISPOR…
How to replicate visualization of trajectory towards UNAIDS 90-90-90 goals
In this tutorial, you’ll gain access to the R code, dataset, and motivation to replicate data visualizations in my latest paper and apply the concepts to your next one. I sat on an airplane last year, flipping through The Economist, when I froze at the sight of a tiny chart littered with a mess of…
I submitted to a “look-alike” journal on purpose. This is why.
The following emails are real correspondence between myself and an Associate Editor at a prestigious scientific journal, which I have called “Journal X” here. It began after I published an article in a journal with a very similar title, a “look-alike” which I am calling “Journal Y”. Names are removed for privacy. Surprise email from…
Immunotherapy increasing at end of life
Our new study on the rise of immunotherapy drugs at the end of life with bladder cancer learned from real-world patients by using @flatironhealth curated EHR data. We hypothesized that advanced urothelial cancer patients would increasingly receive checkpoint inhibitors near the end of life, as they tend to have more favorable side effect profiles…
Incentivizing health-promoting behaviors
A new comprehensive landscape analysis of Medicaid health behavior incentive programs gathers together many challenges and potential solutions in the latest issue of Health Affairs. In 2017-2018 the team interviewed 80 key-informant stakeholders and searched the literature. The most common incentive type offered by programs was gift cards or vouchers, including cash, Visa gift cards, specific venue…
Should we pay some people to take their HIV drugs?
There is little prior evidence of effective interventions to improve viral suppression, despite this being a critical step in the HIV care continuum as described in the National HIV/AIDS Strategy for the United States.
Tools for Reproducible Real-World Data Analysis
The need to use more reproducible tools in health economics and outcomes research is growing rapidly as analyses of real-world data become more frequent, involve larger datasets and employ more complex computations.
data|evidence|policy|practice
The Irish Department of Health (DoH) is in the process of developing a national biosimilar medicines policy which aims to increase biosimilar use by creating a robust framework where biologicals and biosimilars can be used safely, cost-effectively, and confidently in the health service. In this example from an Irish teaching hospital, the introduction of the biosimilar first to new patients, along with a switching study executed in parallel, helped to raise prescriber confidence.
Mentoring Scientists
LifeSci NYC held an inspiring STEM Career Panel at the new Flatiron Health office in SoHo. The LifeSci grad student interns shared how some felt inner conflict between the opportunity to launch straight into an exciting tech career vs. slowing down for grad school.