37 papers
Health economics explores the vital intersection where medical care meets financial reality, examining how resources are allocated, costs are managed, and value is determined in healthcare systems. This field goes beyond simple budgeting to investigate how policy decisions and pricing strategies impact patient access and public health outcomes. By analyzing the economic drivers behind medical treatments, researchers aim to create more sustainable and equitable systems for everyone.
On Gist.Science, we process every new preprint in this category directly from medRxiv, ensuring you have immediate access to the freshest research as it emerges. Our team transforms these complex studies into both plain-language overviews for general readers and detailed technical summaries for specialists, bridging the gap between raw data and actionable insight. Below are the latest papers in health economics, curated to help you navigate the evolving landscape of medical finance and policy.
This study provides the first economic analysis of scaling a school-based menstrual health intervention (MENISCUS) in Uganda, estimating national implementation costs and demonstrating economies of scale to inform government investment and policy decisions.
Replacing tenofovir disoproxil fumarate with tenofovir alafenamide in South Africa's first-line HIV treatment regimen could reduce annual program costs by approximately 5% (around US$54 million) while maintaining clinical effectiveness, offering a feasible interim cost-saving strategy amidst declining funding.
This study of 18,742 Australian stroke patients reveals a non-linear relationship between rehabilitation intensity and functional recovery, identifying a critical "sweet spot" of 27.4 to 54.7 minutes of daily therapy where functional gains are maximized, while lower intensities yield suboptimal results and higher intensities encounter diminishing returns.
The "Aapi" model successfully scaled a digitally monitored, community-led outreach program in urban Pakistan to achieve near-universal family planning coverage for 800,000 residents at a low cost, demonstrating that locally recruited female workers supported by real-time technology can effectively improve contraceptive access and accountability in underserved populations.
This study demonstrates that replacing the standard-dose inactivated influenza vaccine with the recombinant influenza vaccine is cost-effective for adults aged 50 and older in Hong Kong, with the highest cost-effectiveness observed in the 80-and-older age group.
This study validates a low-cost, scalable, and open-source platform in Vietnam that uses large language models to simulate patient conversations in local languages for self-administered assessment of primary care provider competencies, demonstrating that automated transcript scoring achieves reasonable agreement with human experts without requiring translation or in-person enumerators.
This lifecycle modelling study estimates that premature cancer and cardiovascular disease mortality among working-age Europeans cost €195.7 billion (1.24% of GDP) in 2021, with cancer accounting for the majority of losses overall while cardiovascular disease costs were higher in Central and Eastern Europe and exhibited a larger gender gap.
This study analyzing U.S. data from 2001 to 2022 reveals that while overall health-related quality of life improved over time, the negative impact of cardiometabolic conditions on quality of life varied by disease and era, with decrements for diabetes and heart disease attenuating due to better treatment, while obesity-related impacts worsened after 2012.
This cost-effectiveness analysis of Barrett's esophagus surveillance in the Japanese population concludes that annual endoscopy is optimal for low-grade dysplasia and annual breath testing for high-grade dysplasia, while routine surveillance offers limited value for non-dysplastic or short-segment cases.
This paper argues that mandatory Most Favored Nation (MFN) pricing policies, by drastically reducing US drug revenues and rendering the development of many oncology and hematology treatments financially unviable, would ultimately stifle innovation and deprive Medicare beneficiaries of critical new therapies for high unmet medical needs.