Issue #2: Go Your Own Way

Does the brand of basketball influence shooting percentages or attempts? We hear it all the time: “Generics just aren’t the same!” Studies have shown that some patients respond differently between branded and generic medications. Is it psychological or physiological? One could ask the same question in many day-to-day situations. Is the 20 lb dumbbell in the gym actually lighter than the one at home or does it just feel that way? During this season’s ongoing…

Issue #3: There’s No Place Like Home

We explored the medal count boost a country can expect in the year they host the Olympics We stratified the host boost by men and women The results were clear: host countries can expect a significant boost in the number of medals they receive when they host, and medal count returns to normal levels in subsequent Olympics. Perhaps one of the most repeated tropes of the Olympic Games is the economic boost the host country…

Cost-Reduction of Palperidone Palmitate

Schizophrenia results in substantial health care utilization costs. Much of these costs can be attributed to health care use resulting from nonadherence to treatment, relapse, and hospitalization.

Cost-Effectiveness of Linezolid

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) nosocomial pneumonia (NP) is associated with higher resource utilization, increased hospital stays, and mortality. We present a health economics model to understand the impact of using linezolid as the first-line treatment of MRSA NP in Taiwan.

Precision Health Economics

The “big data” era represents an exciting opportunity to utilize powerful new sources of information to reduce clinical and health economic uncertainty on an individual patient level. In turn, health economic outcomes research (HEOR) practices will need to evolve to accommodate individual patient-level HEOR analyses.

Cost-Effectiveness of Pemetrexed

To estimate the cost-effectiveness of pemetrexed maintenance therapy vs basic standard care (BSC) and the economic impacts of providing a PAP for pemetrexed maintenance therapy to NSCLC patients who have completed pemetrexed induction therapy in a Chinese health care setting.

Burden of Inaccurate HER2 Testing

Trastuzumab is administered to patients with early breast cancer (EBC) whose tumors test positive for HER2 using IHC or FISH diagnostic tests. However, due to test characteristics and testing heterogeneity, patients may be misdiagnosed as false positive (FP) or false negative (FN). This analysis estimates the lifetime economic burden of inaccurate HER2 testing in the US.

Predicting Price Changes in Oncology Drugs

Predicting the price change percentages and timings of drugs is important to policy makers, pharmaceutical companies, and even investment firms. As a case study, we utilize a set of oncology drugs in the US and apply hazard models to perform the predictions.

Markov Chain Transition Matrices

Markov models are often used in Health Economics to represent disease progression in Cost-Utility models. The transition probabilities, however, may be difficult to populate when the data are limited. This note applies the Markov matrix approximation method using vector autoregression (VAR) to estimate the transition matrix when the sample size is small.

Cost-Effectiveness of Retesting HER2

Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) and immunohistochemistry (IHC) tests are commonly used to assess human epidermal growth factor 2 (HER2) status of tumors in patients with breast cancer. This analysis evaluates the likely cost-effectiveness of expanded retesting to assess HER2 tumor status in women with early stage breast cancer.

Lifetime Burden of Inaccurate HER2 Testing

Decision analysis was used to estimate the number of patients with early-stage breast cancer (EBC) whose HER2 status was misclassified in 2012. FP results were assumed to generate unnecessary trastuzumab costs and unnecessary cases of trastuzumab-related cardiotoxicity.