After a high risk OUD event (OD or detox)
- White patients get buprenorphine 80% more often than Black pts
- This is not due to diffs in methadone or frequency of health care access
- Rates of rx opioids/benzos are HIGHER than bupe
TL;DR Nursing homes with higher use of COVID-19 tests for staff had 30% fewer resident cases and 26% fewer deaths than low testing facilities. That's a LOT.
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@McGarryBE@ashdgandhi@NEJM Why does this matter? In the early pandemic, we had no vaccines, no Paxlovid. Top priority - keeping COVID out of nursing homes by testing staff frequently. But a lot of nursing homes didn't.
We need to understand what this policy failure cost us.
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@McGarryBE@ashdgandhi@NEJM This is tricky to study because the best predictor of nursing homes testing more is a COVID outbreak.
We got around this by developing a "relative testing rate" for each home, based on how much it tested staff vs. other homes in the same county and week.
It's that time again - my list of 10 of the most thought-provoking, surprising, and rigorous studies in health care in 2022!
Themes this year: 1) Care delivery changes that work (and don't) 2) Race and health care 3) Natural experiments in the ED
+ a few misc. cool papers
Before we dive in - this list is
A) not comprehensive
B) not presented in any particular order
(I’m also focusing on papers written by folks outside my circle of colleagues/collaborators)
First up is a set of 4 studies on changes to care delivery or coverage.
#1: A lot of interventions that "feel" like they should work have not panned out.
A prime example is a very rigorous RCT to improve birth outcomes among Medicaid enrollees in SC published in @JAMA_current led by @maggiemcconnell + Kate Baicker
Here's my list of 12 papers in 2021 at the intersection of health care, medicine, economics and policy that surprised me, made me think, or were just damn clever.
I'm just going to focus on non-COVID-19 papers - we have enough of that other stuff in our feeds.
Off we go!
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Before we dive in - this is
A) definitely not comprehensive
B) definitely not in order of awesomeness
I’m also focusing on papers written by folks outside my direct circle of collaborators (w/ a couple of non-Harvard exceptions I can’t resist).
@NEJM@McGarryBE@ashdgandhi@DavidCGrabowski From June-Aug 2021, we compared resident and staff infection + mortality rates between 12,000 homes with the lowest staff vaccination rates (~30%) vs. highest (~80%).
In the least vaccinated homes:
+132% COVID cases in residents
+58% staff cases
+195% resident mortality
yikes
@NEJM@McGarryBE@ashdgandhi@DavidCGrabowski Over an 8 week period, if all nursing homes were magically raised to the highest staff vaccination levels nationally (~80%), we would have:
4,775 fewer resident cases
7,501 fewer staff cases
703 fewer resident deaths (nearly 50% of all deaths)