# Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 11th June 2018

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.

End-of-life healthcare expenditure: testing economic explanations using a discrete choice experiment. Journal of Health Economics Published 7th June 2018

People incur a lot of health care costs at the end of life, despite the fact that – by definition – they aren’t going to get much value from it (so long as we’re using QALYs, anyway). In a 2007 paper, Gary Becker and colleagues put forward a theory for the high value of life and high expenditure on health care at the end of life. This article sets out to test a set of hypotheses derived from this theory, namely: i) higher willingness-to-pay (WTP) for health care with proximity to death, ii) higher WTP with greater chance of survival, iii) societal WTP exceeds individual WTP due to altruism, and iv) societal WTP may exceed individual WTP due to an aversion to restricting access to new end-of-life care. A further set of hypotheses relating to the ‘pain of risk-bearing’ is also tested. The authors conducted an online discrete choice experiment (DCE) with 1,529 Swiss residents, which asked respondents to suppose that they had terminal cancer and was designed to elicit WTP for a life-prolonging novel cancer drug. Attributes in the DCE included survival, quality of life, and ‘hope’ (chance of being cured). Individual WTP – using out-of-pocket costs – and societal WTP – based on social health insurance – were both estimated. The overall finding is that the hypotheses are on the whole true, at least in part. But the fact is that different people have different preferences – the authors note that “preferences with regard to end-of-life treatment are very heterogeneous”. The findings provide evidence to explain the prevailing high level of expenditure in end of life (cancer) care. But the questions remain of what we can or should do about it, if anything.

Valuation of preference-based measures: can existing preference data be used to generate better estimates? Health and Quality of Life Outcomes [PubMed] Published 5th June 2018

The EuroQol website lists EQ-5D-3L valuation studies for 27 countries. As the EQ-5D-5L comes into use, we’re going to see a lot of new valuation studies in the pipeline. But what if we could use data from one country’s valuation to inform another’s? The idea is that a valuation study in one country may be able to ‘borrow strength’ from another country’s valuation data. The author of this article has developed a Bayesian non-parametric model to achieve this and has previously applied it to UK and US EQ-5D valuations. But what about situations in which few data are available in the country of interest, and where the country’s cultural characteristics are substantially different. This study reports on an analysis to generate an SF-6D value set for Hong Kong, firstly using the Hong Kong values only, and secondly using the UK value set as a prior. As expected, the model which uses the UK data provided better predictions. And some of the differences in the valuation of health states are quite substantial (i.e. more than 0.1). Clearly, this could be a useful methodology, especially for small countries. But more research is needed into the implications of adopting the approach more widely.

Can a smoking ban save your heart? Health Economics [PubMed] Published 4th June 2018

Here we have another Swiss study, relating to the country’s public-place smoking bans. Exposure to tobacco smoke can have an acute and rapid impact on health to the extent that we would expect an immediate reduction in the risk of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) if a smoking ban reduces the number of people exposed. Studies have already looked at this effect, and found it to be large, but mostly with simple pre-/post- designs that don’t consider important confounding factors or prevailing trends. This study tests the hypothesis in a quasi-experimental setting, taking advantage of the fact that the 26 Swiss cantons implemented smoking bans at different times between 2007 and 2010. The authors analyse individual-level data from Swiss hospitals, estimating the impact of the smoking ban on AMI incidence, with area and time fixed effects, area-specific time trends, and unemployment. The findings show a large and robust effect of the smoking ban(s) for men, with a reduction in AMI incidence of about 11%. For women, the effect is weaker, with an average reduction of around 2%. The evidence also shows that men in low-education regions experienced the greatest benefit. What makes this an especially nice paper is that the authors bring in other data sources to help explain their findings. Panel survey data are used to demonstrate that non-smokers are likely to be the group benefitting most from smoking bans and that people working in public places and people with less education are most exposed to environmental tobacco smoke. These findings might not be generalisable to other settings. Other countries implemented more gradual policy changes and Switzerland had a particularly high baseline smoking rate. But the findings suggest that smoking bans are associated with population health benefits (and the associated cost savings) and could also help tackle health inequalities.

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# Hawking is right, Jeremy Hunt does egregiously cherry pick the evidence

I’m beginning to think Jeremy Hunt doesn’t actually care what the evidence says on the weekend effect. Last week, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking criticized Hunt for ‘cherry picking’ evidence with regard to the ‘weekend effect’: that patients admitted at the weekend are observed to be more likely than their counterparts admitted on a weekday to die. Hunt responded by doubling down on his claims:

Some people have questioned Hawking’s credentials to speak on the topic beyond being a user of the NHS. But it has taken a respected public figure to speak out to elicit a response from the Secretary of State for Health, and that should be welcomed. It remains the case though that a multitude of experts do continue to be ignored. Even the oft-quoted Freemantle paper is partially ignored where it notes of the ‘excess’ weekend deaths, “to assume that [these deaths] are avoidable would be rash and misleading.”

We produced a simple tool to demonstrate how weekend effect studies might estimate an increased risk of mortality associated with weekend admissions even in the case of no difference in care quality. However, the causal model underlying these arguments is not always obvious. So here it is:

A simple model of the effect of the weekend on patient health outcomes. The dashed line represents unobserved effects

So what do we know about the weekend effect?

1. The weekend effect exists. A multitude of studies have observed that patients admitted at the weekend are more likely to die than those admitted on a weekday. This amounts to having shown that $E(Y|W,S) \neq E(Y|W',S)$. As our causal model demonstrates, being admitted is correlated with health and, importantly, the day of the week. So, this is not the same as saying that risk of adverse clinical outcomes differs by day of the week if you take into account propensity for admission, we can’t say $E(Y|W) \neq E(Y|W')$. Nor does this evidence imply care quality differs at the weekend, $E(Q|W) \neq E(Q|W')$. In fact, the evidence only implies differences in care quality if the propensity to be admitted is independent of (unobserved) health status, i.e. $Pr(S|U,X) = Pr(S|X)$ (or if health outcomes are uncorrelated with health status, which is definitely not the case!).
2. Admissions are different at the weekend. Fewer patients are admitted at the weekend and those that are admitted are on average more severely unwell. Evidence suggests that the better patient severity is controlled for, the smaller the estimated weekend effect. Weekend effect estimates also diminish in models that account for the selection mechanism.
3. There is some evidence that care quality may be worse at the weekend (at least in the United States). So $E(Q|W) \neq E(Q|W')$. Although this has not been established in the UK (we’re currently investigating it!)
4. Staffing levels, particularly specialist to patient ratios, are different at the weekend, $E(X|W) \neq E(X|W')$.
5. There is little evidence to suggest how staffing levels and care quality are related. While the relationship seems evident prima facie, its extent is not well understood, for example, we might expect a diminishing return to increased staffing levels.
6. There is a reasonable amount of evidence on the impact of care quality (preventable errors and adverse events) on patient health outcomes.

But what are we actually interested in from a policy perspective? Do we actually care that it is the weekend per se? I would say no, we care that there is potentially a lapse in care quality. So, it’s a two part question: (i) how does care quality (and hence avoidable patient harm) differ at the weekend $E(Q|W) - E(Q|W') = ?$; and (ii) what effect does this have on patient outcomes $E(Y|Q)=?$. The first question answers to what extent policy may affect change and the second gives us a way of valuing that change and yet the vast majority of studies in the area address neither. Despite there being a number of publicly funded research projects looking at these questions right now, it’s the studies that are not useful for policy that keep being quoted by those with the power to make change.

Hawking is right, Jeremy Hunt has egregiously cherry picked and misrepresented the evidence, as has been pointed out again and again and again and again and … One begins to wonder if there isn’t some motive other than ensuring long run efficiency and equity in the health service.

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# Sam Watson’s journal round-up for 21st August 2017

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.

Multidimensional performance assessment of public sector organisations using dominance criteria. Health Economics [RePEcPublished 18th August 2017

The empirical assessment of the performance or quality of public organisations such as health care providers is an interesting and oft-tackled problem. Despite the development of sophisticated methods in a large and growing literature, public bodies continue to use demonstrably inaccurate or misleading statistics such as the standardised mortality ratio (SMR). Apart from the issue that these statistics may not be very well correlated with underlying quality, organisations may improve on a given measure by sacrificing their performance on another outcome valued by different stakeholders. One example from a few years ago showed how hospital rankings based upon SMRs shifted significantly if one took into account readmission rates and their correlation with SMRs. This paper advances this thinking a step further by considering multiple outcomes potentially valued by stakeholders and using dominance criteria to compare hospitals. A hospital dominates another if it performs at least as well or better across all outcomes. Importantly, correlation between these measures is captured in a multilevel model. I am an advocate of this type of approach, that is, the use of multilevel models to combine information across multiple ‘dimensions’ of quality. Indeed, my only real criticism would be that it doesn’t go far enough! The multivariate normal model used in the paper assumes a linear relationship between outcomes in their conditional distributions. Similarly, an instrumental variable model is also used (using the now routine distance-to-health-facility instrumental variable) that also assumes a linear relationship between outcomes and ‘unobserved heterogeneity’. The complex behaviour of health care providers may well suggest these assumptions do not hold – for example, failing institutions may well show poor performance across the board, while other facilities are able to trade-off outcomes with one another. This would suggest a non-linear relationship. I’m also finding it hard to get my head around the IV model: in particular what the covariance matrix for the whole model is and if correlations are permitted in these models at multiple levels as well. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting take on the performance question, but my faith that decent methods like this will be used in practice continues to wane as organisations such as Dr Foster still dominate quality monitoring.

A simultaneous equation approach to estimating HIV prevalence with nonignorable missing responses. Journal of the American Statistical Association [RePEcPublished August 2017

Non-response is a problem encountered more often than not in survey based data collection. For many public health applications though, surveys are the primary way of determining the prevalence and distribution of disease, knowledge of which is required for effective public health policy. Methods such as multiple imputation can be used in the face of missing data, but this requires an assumption that the data are missing at random. For disease surveys this is unlikely to be true. For example, the stigma around HIV may make many people choose not to respond to an HIV survey, thus leading to a situation where data are missing not at random. This paper tackles the question of estimating HIV prevalence in the face of informative non-response. Most economists are familiar with the Heckman selection model, which is a way of correcting for sample selection bias. The Heckman model is typically estimated or viewed as a control function approach in which the residuals from a selection model are used in a model for the outcome of interest to control for unobserved heterogeneity. An alternative way of representing this model is as copula between a survey response variable and the response variable itself. This representation is more flexible and permits a variety of models for both selection and outcomes. This paper includes spatial effects (given the nature of disease transmission) not only in the selection and outcomes models, but also in the model for the mixing parameter between the two marginal distributions, which allows the degree of informative non-response to differ by location and be correlated over space. The instrumental variable used is the identity of the interviewer since different interviewers are expected to be more or less successful at collecting data independent of the status of the individual being interviewed.

Clustered multistate models with observation level random effects, mover–stayer effects and dynamic covariates: modelling transition intensities and sojourn times in a study of psoriatic arthritis. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C [ArXiv] Published 25th July 2017

Modelling the progression of disease accurately is important for economic evaluation. A delicate balance between bias and variance should be sought: a model too simple will be wrong for most people, a model too complex will be too uncertain. A huge range of models therefore exists from ‘simple’ decision trees to ‘complex’ patient-level simulations. A popular choice are multistate models, such as Markov models, which provide a convenient framework for examining the evolution of stochastic processes and systems. A common feature of such models is the Markov property, which is that the probability of moving to a given state is independent of what has happened previously. This can be relaxed by adding covariates to model transition properties that capture event history or other salient features. This paper provides a neat example of extending this approach further in the case of arthritis. The development of arthritic damage in a hand joint can be described by a multistate model, but there are obviously multiple joints in one hand. What is more, the outcomes in any one joint are not likely to be independent of one another. This paper describes a multilevel model of transition probabilities for multiple correlated processes along with other extensions like dynamic covariates and different mover-stayer probabilities.

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