I have recently been watching the BBC series Ambulance. It is a fly-on-the-wall documentary following the West Midlands Ambulance Service interspersed with candid interviews with ambulance staff, much in the same vein as other health care documentaries like 24 Hours in A&E. As much… Read More »Ambulance and economics
Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow passed away on February 21, 2017. In a classic, fifty-year-old paper entitled Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care, Arrow discussed how: “the operation of the medical-care industry and the efficacy with which it satisfies… Read More »Kenneth Arrow on healthcare economics: a 21st century appreciation
In a well-publicized snapshot of the challenge of ICU triage, Chang and colleagues wrote: Critical care services can be life-saving, but many patients admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) are too sick or, conversely, not sick enough to benefit. Intensive care… Read More »ICU triage: a challenge and an opportunity
Personalised medicine appears to be an inevitable future of health care, and economists aren’t ready for it. It has various monikers and related concepts including precision medicine, stratified medicine, pharmacogenomics, pharmacogenetics and predictive medicine. But, whatever you call it, it means big… Read More »Economics of personalised medicine: an introduction