June 6, 2019
Briefly
- Data is Personal. What We Learned from 42 Interviews in Rural America. at Medium (via Andrew Gelman)
- Two posts on ways people display uncertainty in graphics (via Alberto Cairo)
- From Casey Fiesler Scientists Like Me Are Studying Your Tweets—Are You OK With That?
- Animated visualisation of what diseases were most studied over the past 70 years
- Story from the Sydney Morning Herald about weather forecasting, including new 3-week weather outlook predictions that the Bureau of Meteorology is planning to produce
- “Cancer drugs that speed onto the market based on encouraging preliminary studies often don’t show clear benefits when more careful follow-up trials are done,” from NPR
- Pharmac’s top-20 expenditures from last year. For anyone who wants to have an opinion on how Pharmac should spend its budget.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I agree that how Pharmac is funded and allocates its money is an important topic, and thus people need data, which is more than mere labels and numbers as Pharmac is currently providing.
The names of medicines appear to me to be created by a random syllable generator and it would very helpful if I knew what problem the medicine is expected to help with. I note that they give spend per therapeutic group.
Also how many people take it, as $1,00,000 allocated to 10 patients is different than when allocated to 1,000 patients. I imagine this should be relatively easy to generate given access to data, though I suspect commercial sensitivity would raise its head but an order of magnitude should be possible.
An analysis with expected additional life years would be nice – QALY would be even better but trickier. After all that’s the starting point of deciding how much we spend and where.
5 years ago
What it’s used for and the unit cost can be found in the Pharmac Schedule. It’s harder to get the data on how much benefit there is: some of that probably is commercially sensitive.
The really difficult part for the most expensive drugs is the size of the secret discounts. We’re probably not spending quite that much on adalimumab (an antibody against TNF-alpha, used to treat various autoimmune diseases) because part of it probably comes back under the table. That really is commercially sensitive, and the ability to negotiate those deals is an important part of Pharmac’s toolkit.
International non-proprietary names aren’t that transparent even to those in the know, but anything that’s been tested enough for Pharmac to buy it will have a helpful Wikipedia page.
5 years ago