LEARNING THE ECONOMICS OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES
Kangho Suh wrote an excellent article on the use of instrumental variables in healthcare. I agree this technique strengthens causal inference for analyses of observational data. This is even more important when a randomized controlled trial is not feasible or ethical. SaveSave Continue reading Visual IV Primer
Failure to consider these methods could result in unintended consequences and exacerbate existing inequalities in health between patients who are “average” and “outliers.” Continue reading Why You Should Care About Person-Centered Treatment Effects
Remember the good old days, when professors let you bring to an exam one 8.5″x11″ single-sided cheat sheet crammed with your tiniest scrawled notes about what you expected could be on the test? The landscape of immuno-oncology is changing so rapidly that in January I longed for a “cheat sheet” to keep up with the … Continue reading CHEAT SHEET: Cancer Immunotherapy
Data scientists younger than Taylor Swift can do everyone a favor by reading “Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions” by NPR journalist Richard Harris. It sparks uncomfortable conversations about the broken incentives in our research system. Read my full book review “Difficult Choices Between What is Best for … Continue reading Book Review
A key to making causal inference with observational data Continue reading Propensity Scores
Lipira and colleagues recently published this comprehensive review article framing a research agenda to evaluate the impact of the Affordable Care Act (commonly called the “ACA” or “Obamacare”) on HIV care, outcomes, prevention, and disparities. Lipira and colleagues identified several challenges to comprehensive HIV care that could be remedied with informed programming and policy. First, the ACA does … Continue reading How should we evaluate ACA impact on HIV?
Let’s keep digging into the association between Google searches and the number of people starting PrEP drugs by fitting a poisson model of the time series in R. We’ll use this work-in-progress to kick off a discussion on validation of models used to forecast utilization. To review: First, we first noticed a similarity in the trends … Continue reading How to Validate Forecasts
It is hard for us to know exactly how many people take the drug Truvada (TDF/FTC) to prevent versus treat HIV. Word is spreading through communities about this daily pill to the reduce risk of infection, and as people become informed the number of users is increasing. Can Google help us predict this uptake? Building … Continue reading Predicting Drug Uptake Using Google Searches
Lately I’ve been exploring trends in utilization of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis. Data from Google Trends shows a spike in the number of searches for “emtriciabine/tenofovir” when the FDA approved its use for HIV prevention in addition to treatment. More general searches for HIV PrEP are increasing at a rate that looks very similar to the … Continue reading Trends in PrEP interest
This is the story of how I met the most powerful man in the European Union and found my picture with him in a German newspaper. Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank, attended the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting to deliver a keynote address to hundreds of Ph.D. Economics students (including me) and 19 … Continue reading Meeting the President of the European Central Bank
