1. Bad Arguments → Bad Choices
Great news. There will be a follow-on to the excellent Bad Arguments book by @alialmossawi. The book of Bad Choices will be released this April by major publishers. You can preorder now.
2. Evidence-based decisions → Effective policy outcomes
The conservative think tank, Heritage Foundation, is advocating for evidence-based decisions in the Trump administration. Their recommendations include resurrection of PART (the Program Assessment Rating Tool) from the George W. Bush era, which ranked federal programs according to effectiveness. “Blueprint for a New Administration offers specific steps that the new President and the top officers of all 15 cabinet-level departments and six key executive agencies can take to implement the long-term policy visions reflected in Blueprint for Reform.” Read a nice summary here by Patrick Lester at the Social Innovation Research Center (@SIRC_tweets).
3. Pioneer drugs → Investment value
“Why do pharma firms sometimes prioritize ‘me-too’ R&D projects over high-risk, high-reward ‘pioneer’ programs?” asks Frank David at Pharmagellan (@Frank_S_David). “[M]any pharma financial models assume first-in-class drugs will gain commercial traction more slowly than ‘followers.’ The problem is that when a drug’s projected revenues are delayed in a financial forecast, this lowers its net present value – which can torpedo the already tenuous investment case for a risky, innovative R&D program.” Their research suggests that pioneer drugs see peak sales around 6 years, similar to followers: “Our finding that pioneer drugs are adopted no more slowly than me-too ones could help level the economic playing field and make riskier, but often higher-impact, R&D programs more attractive to executives and investors.”
Details appear in the Nature Reviews article, Drug launch curves in the modern era. Pharmagellan will soon release a book on biotech financial modeling.
4. Unrealistic expectations → Questioning ‘evidence-based medicine’
As we’ve noted before, @EvidenceLive has a manifesto addressing how to make healthcare decisions, and how to communicate evidence. The online comments are telling: Evidence-based medicine is perhaps more of a concept than a practical thing. The spot-on @trishgreenhalgh says “The world is messy. There is no view from nowhere, no perspective that is free from bias.”
Posted by Tracy Allison Altman on 14-Dec-2016.
