Who pays for health care? Who uses it?
Ultimately, individuals and households pay for health care. Whether payments are made directly to providers, via taxes or through commercial insurance, households are the sole source of health care...
View ArticleAugmented inverse propensity weighted (AIPW) estimator
Let’s say you want to measure the causal impact of a specific treatment on patient outcomes from real-world data. Many statistical approaches discuss the appropriate way to estimate this causal effect...
View ArticleHow to justify your survival curve extrapolation methodology
Clinical trials are typically of (relatively) short duration, but innovative treatments may impact patient survival over multiple years. Health economists and outcomes researchers often are faced with...
View ArticleWhat is collider bias?
A paper by Holmberg et al. (2022) in JAMA provides a number of examples of how collider bias can lead to problematic causal inference. The term collider bias is often invoked when using directed...
View ArticleHow linear mixed models can help with missing data
What should you do when you want to conduct a cost-effectiveness analysis based on efficacy estimates from clinical trials but the trial has missing data. One common approach—known as complete case...
View ArticleShould you adjust for baseline characteristics within randomized controlled...
At first glance, one may think the answer is no. Randomization should insure that baseline characteristics are balanced across trial arms. In practice, however, sometimes baseline characteristics due...
View ArticleCan you emulate clinical trials with observational data?
While randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the gold standard of experimental research, there are some limitations. For instance, in some cases use of an RCT is not feasible (e.g., the sample size...
View ArticleDual eligibles: A statistical overview
Medicare covers largely elderly individuals, the disabled, and individuals with end stage kidney disease. Medicaid covers low-income individuals. So who are dual eligibles, that qualify for both...
View ArticlePrescription drug use over a lifetime
That is the topic of an interesting paper by Ho (2023). Prescription drug use has reached historic highs in the United States—a trend linked to increases in medicalization, institutional factors...
View ArticleHow COVID-19 could impact clinical trial results and what to do about it
A paper by Meyer et al. (2020) has a nice summary of potential mechanisms through which the presence of COVID-19 could impact clinical trial results. What should a researcher do when a clinical trial...
View Article
More Pages to Explore .....