Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.
Transparency in health economic modeling: options, issues and potential solutions. PharmacoEconomics [PubMed] Published 8th October 2019
Reading this paper was a strange experience. The purpose of the paper, and its content, is much the same as a paper of my own, which was published in the same journal a few months ago.
The authors outline what they see as the options for transparency in the context of decision modelling, with a focus on open source models and a focus on for whom the details are transparent. Models might be transparent to a small number of researchers (e.g. in peer review), to HTA agencies, or to the public at large. The paper includes a figure showing the two aspects of transparency, termed ‘reach’ and ‘level’, which relate to the number of people who can access the information and the level of detail made available. We provided a similar figure in our paper, using the terms ‘breadth’ and ‘depth’, which is at least some validation of our idea. The authors then go on to discuss five ‘issues’ with transparency: copyright, model misuse, confidential data, software, and time/resources. These issues are framed as questions, to which the authors posit some answers as solutions.
Perhaps inevitably, I think our paper does a better job, and so I’m probably over-critical of this article. Ours is more comprehensive, if nothing else. But I also think the authors make a few missteps. There’s a focus on models created by academic researchers, which oversimplifies the discussion somewhat. Open source modelling is framed as a more complete solution than it really is. The ‘issues’ that are discussed are at points framed as drawbacks or negative features of transparency, which they aren’t. Certainly, they’re challenges, but they aren’t reasons not to pursue transparency. ‘Copyright’ seems to be used as a synonym for intellectual property, and transparency is considered to be a threat to this. The authors’ proposed solution here is to use licensing fees. I think that’s a bad idea. Levying a fee creates an incentive to disregard copyright, not respect it.
It’s a little ironic that both this paper and my own were published, when both describe the benefits of transparency in terms of reducing “duplication of efforts”. No doubt, I read this paper with a far more critical eye than I normally would. Had I not published a paper on precisely the same subject, I might’ve thought this paper was brilliant.
If we recognize heterogeneity of treatment effect can we lessen waste? Journal of Comparative Effectiveness Research [PubMed] Published 1st October 2019
This commentary starts from the premise that a pervasive overuse of resources creates a lot of waste in health care, which I guess might be true in the US. Apparently, this is because clinicians have an insufficient understanding of heterogeneity in treatment effects and therefore assume average treatment effects for their patients. The authors suggest that this situation is reinforced by clinical trial publications tending to only report average treatment effects. I’m not sure whether the authors are arguing that clinicians are too knowledgable and dependent on the research, or that they don’t know the research well enough. Either way, it isn’t a very satisfying explanation of the overuse of health care. Certainly, patients could benefit from more personalised care, and I would support the authors’ argument in favour of stratified studies and the reporting of subgroup treatment effects. The most insightful part of this paper is the argument that these stratifications should be on the basis of observable characteristics. It isn’t much use to your general practitioner if personalisation requires genome sequencing. In short, I agree with the authors’ argument that we should do more to recognise heterogeneity of treatment effects, but I’m not sure it has much to do with waste.
No evidence for a protective effect of education on mental health. Social Science & Medicine Published 3rd October 2019
When it comes to the determinants of health and well-being, I often think back to my MSc dissertation research. As part of that, I learned that a) stuff that you might imagine to be important often isn’t and b) methodological choices matter a lot. Though it wasn’t the purpose of my study, it seemed from this research that higher education has a negative effect on people’s subjective well-being. But there isn’t much research out there to help us understand the association between education and mental health in general.
This study add to a small body of literature on the impact of changes in compulsory schooling on mental health. In (West) Germany, education policy was determined at the state level, so when compulsory schooling was extended from eight to nine years, different states implemented the change at different times between 1949 and 1969. This study includes 5,321 people, with 20,290 person-year observations, from the German Socio-Economic Panel survey (SOEP). Inclusion was based on people being born seven years either side of the cutoff birth year for which the longer compulsory schooling was enacted, with a further restriction to people aged between 50 and 85. The SOEP includes the SF-12 questionnaire, which includes a mental health component score (MCS). There is also an 11-point life satisfaction scale. The authors use an instrumental variable approach, using the policy change as an instrument for years of schooling and estimating a standard two-stage least squares model. The MCS score, life satisfaction score, and a binary indicator for MCS score lower than or equal to 45.6, are all modelled as separate outcomes.
Estimates using an OLS model show a positive and highly significant effect of years of schooling on all three outcomes. But when the instrumental variable model is used, this effect disappears. An additional year of schooling in this model is associated with a statistically and clinically insignificant decrease in the MCS score. Also insignificant was the finding that more years of schooling increases the likelihood of developing symptoms of a mental health disorder (as indicated by the MCS threshold of 45.6) and that life satisfaction is slightly lower. The same model shows a positive effect on physical health, which corresponds with previous research and provides some reassurance that the model could detect an effect if one existed.
The specification of the model seems reasonable and a host of robustness checks are reported. The only potential issue I could spot is that a person’s state of residence at the time of schooling is not observed, and so their location at entry into the sample is used. Given that education is associated with mobility, this could be a problem, and I would have liked to see the authors subject it to more testing. The overall finding – that an additional year of school for people who might otherwise only stay at school for eight years does not improve mental health – is persuasive. But the extent to which we can say anything more general about the impact of education on well-being is limited. What if it had been three years of additional schooling, rather than one? There is still much work to be done in this area.
Scientific sinkhole: the pernicious price of formatting. PLoS One [PubMed] Published 26th September 2019
This study is based on a survey that asked 372 researchers from 41 countries about the time they spent formatting manuscripts for journal submission. Let’s see how I can frame this as health economics… Well, some of the participants are health researchers. The time they spend on formatting journal submissions is time not spent on health research. The opportunity cost of time spent formatting could be measured in terms of health.
The authors focused on the time and wage costs of formatting. The results showed that formatting took a median time of 52 hours per person per year, at a cost of $477 per manuscript or $1,908 per person per year. Researchers spend – on average – 14 hours on formatting a manuscript. That’s outrageous. I have never spent that long on formatting. If you do, you only have yourself to blame. Or maybe it’s just because of what I consider to constitute formatting. The survey asked respondents to consider formatting of figures, tables, and supplementary files. Improving the format of a figure or a table can add real value to a paper. A good figure or table can change a bad paper to a good paper. I’d love to know how the time cost differed for people using LaTeX.
Credits
“If we recognize heterogeneity of treatment effect can we lessen waste?”
I was at the ADA/EASD precision medicine meeting in Madrid last week – Dutch researcher there was talking about how they were doing this using clinical trial data for 15,000 people to inform decisions on today’s patients. It was more about looking at the side effects of drugs (I think…) and that one would not use a drug which worsened kidney function say in someone whose kidney function was already compromised.
Working on real-life evidence in outcomes from anti-VEGF injections for diabetic eye disease there are differences by subgroups – but then putting this into the information that’s being used by a clinician isn’t going to be easy – would mean the EPR software doing a lot of stuff…