Publications

The emergence and increasing use of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) in healthcare practice and delivery is being greeted with both optimism and caution. We focus on the nexus of AI/ML and racial disparities in healthcare: an issue that must be addressed if the promise of AI to improve patient care and health outcomes is to be realized in an equitable manner for all populations.

The United States faces an ongoing drug crisis, worsened by the undertreatment of substance use disorders (SUDs). Family enrollment in high deductible health plans (HDHPs) and the resulting increased cost exposure could exacerbate the undertreatment of SUD. This study characterized the distribution of health care spending within families where a member has a SUD and estimated the association between HDHPs and family health care spending.

There is much debate about the effects of pharmaceutical direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) on health care use. In this paper, we inform this debate by examining the effects of DTCA on office visits, as well as treatment courses resulting from those visits, for five common chronic conditions (hypertension, hyperlipidemia, diabetes, depression, and osteoporosis). In particular, we examine whether office visits result in use of drug therapy and/or continued office visits over time.

Care partners have an active role during medical visits of older adults with hearing loss (HL) and dementia. Efforts to support care partner engagement and teach advocacy skills may close gaps in care quality for the subgroup of older adults who are living with HL and dementia.

While providers are aware of the financial burden of healthcare for patients, there is a lack of actionable price transparency at the point of prescribing. Real-time prescription benefit (RTPB) tools are new electronic clinical decision support tools that retrieve patient- and medication-specific out-of-pocket cost information and display it to clinicians at the point of prescribing.

Significant racial disparities were observed in discussions, prescribing, and use of diabetes technology.

Interactions with wearable devices, smartphones, and social media generate user data, which can reveal sensitive health information. Those data can be used to improve individual and community health, but also raise security and privacy concerns. Given potential benefits alongside substantial privacy risks, it is important to evaluate how consumers view organizations and entities that collect and re-use their personal digital health data. We surveyed US consumers to assess their confidence in sixteen public and private organizations to use their digital health data responsibly.

Findings suggest that Basaglar was not less expensive for patients than Lantus. Empirical evaluation of biosimilar costs prior to automatic substitution is necessary.

In this cross-sectional analysis of the top 1000 generics in Colorado’s all-payer claims database in 2019, 45 high-cost generics that had lower-cost therapeutic alternatives of same clinical value were identified. Overall, high-cost generics were 15.6 times more expensive than their therapeutic alternatives (median values); if the lower-cost alternatives had been used, total spending would have been reduced by 88.3%.

Understanding cognitive health, its decline, and the investments that shape its age profile in later life are important in an aging society, and yet, estimating the cognitive health production function is complicated by non-random mortality and sample attrition. The author studies this dynamic selection problem in the context of education, race, and cigarette smoking, characteristics thought to affect the level, but not slope, of cognitive decline. The author develops a general framework that involves estimation of a system of dynamic equations consistent with the Grossman (1972) model.