Susan Domchek, New York Times, BRCA Gene Screening
Guidelines Change, and Some Guidelines Change More than Others
Lest we forget that guidelines are (and should be) living, breathing documents, LDI Senior Fellows Mark Neuman and Sandy Schwartz provide an excellent reminder in a new study in JAMA that reviews the “durability” of recommendations across serial versions of the same cardiology guidelines.
Ensemble of trees approaches to risk adjustment for evaluating a hospital’s performance
Yang Liu, Mikhail Traskin, Scott Lorch, Edward George, Dylan Small
In Health Care Management Science, Dylan Small, Scott Lorch and colleagues discuss different mechanisms of risk adjustment used in hospital performance evaluations. Accurate risk adjustment is critical to the reliable assessment and comparison of hospitals. Hospitals are commonly assessed using evaluations that measure their actual outcomes as compared to their risk-adjusted expected outcomes, which take into account factors like patient mix in order to compare hospitals on a level playing field. The authors propose ensemble of trees approaches as superior alternatives to the logistic...
The Exnovation Conundrum
How do we get people and organizations to change, especially when what they are currently doing adds little value, is very costly, is perhaps outmoded, and may, at worst, be dangerous? This is the question Benjamin Roman and David Asch raise in their new Annals of Internal Medicine piece on "Faded Promises".
What Big Data Can’t Tell Us, But Kolstad’s Paper Suggests
The good news is that LDI Senior Fellow Jonathan Kolstad has won the prestigious Arrow Award for the Best Paper in Health Economics for his study entitled, Information and Quality When Motivation is Intrinsic: Evidence from Surgeon Report Cards.
Zachary Meisel, NBC, Narrative as ER Tool
Pulling Back the Curtain: How Hospitals Can Learn From Fast Food Restaurants
Recently, the economist Uwe Reinhardt heralded the arrival of price transparency as a "disruptive innovation" in health care. Through modern electronic technology, Reinhardt predicts, open price competition may unleash the powers of the raw market to contain costs and improve quality.
Robert Aronowitz Papers Detail Highly Dubious 1950's Research Study
Scott Halpern Named IOM Anniversary Fellow
Effects of Conflict-of-Interest Policies in Psychiatry Residency on Antidepressant Prescribing
This Issue Brief examines how COI policies affect the prescribing patterns of antidepressants, one of the most heavily promoted drug classes in the past decade. As such, it provides the first empirical evidence of the effects of COI policies in residency on the subsequent prescribing patterns of practicing physicians.