Propensity Scores
A key to making causal inference with observational data Continue reading Propensity Scores
How should we evaluate ACA impact on HIV?
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?
How to Validate Forecasts
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
Predicting Drug Uptake Using Google Searches
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
Trends in PrEP interest
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
Meeting the President of the European Central Bank
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
The Nobel Meeting
I met 18 Nobel Prize winners in Economics and some of the brightest economics Ph.D. students from around the world at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Germany. We swapped ideas and inspired each other over five days of activities. After Lindau, I continued traveling to meet with leaders of health economics in Zurich, Basel, … Continue reading The Nobel Meeting
French Innovation
During a visit to the French Ministry of Health, Emilie Sam explained to me the mechanisms for French investments in the innovation of new biomedical technologies. Many of the new life-saving products have a big impact on their budget for medicines in France. It will be interesting to wait and see at what rate this … Continue reading French Innovation
Before & After: Time Series Visualization
Often the fastest graph to generate is not the simplest way to communicate meaning. For an analysis of trends over time in pharmacoeconomic graduate student interests, take a look at this figure before and then after modifications to improve visualization of survey results. The first graph under-utilizes the ordering of years by assigning color categories … Continue reading Before & After: Time Series Visualization
Rising cost of HIV drugs
Digging through the Medicaid Prescription Drug Database, I want to find out if HIV drug prices are rising faster over time compared to other daily medications for chronic diseases. I stratified by the number of drugs in each combination tablet, and next I will need to adjust for inflation. Let me know if you think of … Continue reading Rising cost of HIV drugs