There is no required textbook.
Syllabus
Jump to the Readings and Schedule. or to some Background Readings of possible interest.

Announcements

Readings and Schedule (Tentative)

9/26 OR's next top model

9/29 Overview of cost-effectiveness
The CEA Registry is a resource to find cost-effectiveness studies, cost-effectiveness values, and quality of life adjustment factors.

10/1 Male circumcision and HIV and Banning HIV positive immigrants

10/6 Anesthesia risk (slightly more detail here) and Testing for coronary artery disease

10/8 New Haven needle exchange program,
slides and a picture of the dynamics over time.

10/15 Selecting the patient panel size for a GP
20-year plan for nurse staffing in British Columbia. It gives a Canadian perspective on long-term planning.
slides and a picture showing a sensitivity analysis of the patient panel size.

10/20 Screening for Hepatitis C and appendix

10/22 Google flu trends: preprint, Nature paper, and supplementary info.
slides

10/27 Evidence-Based Incentive Systems with an Application in Health Care Delivery by Donald K.K. Lee and Stefanos A. Zenios. There's also a shorter paper (that we won't cover and is not required reading) with a similar idea but without the sophisticated empirical work.
slides

10/29 (starting at 9am!) Special guest lecture by Baris Ata on Optimizing Liver Allocation System Incorporating Disease Evolution.

11/3 Asthma

11/5 (starting at 9am!) Cadaveric liver transplants: optimal timing and the price of keeping the waiting list private. This will be a special guest lecture by Burhan Sandikci.

11/10 Infectious disease models, Review of deterministic models

11/12 Spread of HCV, slides

11/17 Concurrent relationships and HIV (Don't forget to look at the appendix.)

11/19 Special guest lecture by Jonathan Turner on scheduling medical residents. Please read this paper and the editorial comment. slides

11/24 Special guest lecture by Sarang Deo. HIV treatment scale-up, Equitable allocation of HIV drugs, Urban-rural divide in HIV drug allocation

12/1 Special guest lecture by Dirk Brockmann. Spread of epidemics: Swine flu forecasts, book chapter, and article

Background Readings

A Global Perspective

Here are some background readings giving a global perspective on health policy.
Hans Rosling gives a short talk on developing countries at the TED conference.
Global Burden of Disease by the WHO.

The American Health Care Debate

We will not cover the current American health care debate but here are some nice readings for those who are interested.
The Cost Conundrum a New Yorker article by Atul Gawande examining why the US system is so expensive
Presentation by Peter Orzag, head of the Congressional Budget Office. See slides 12 and 13 on the connection between quality and cost.
Health of Nations an American Prospect article by Ezra Klein on the health care systems of other developed countries.
Health Care Rationing Rhetoric Overlooks Reality by David Leonhardt in the New York Times makes the simple point that resources are constrained, even if only by a budget constraint.
8 Questions About Health-Care Reform by Ceci Connolly and Alec MacGillis (written on 9/8/2009).
Ezra Klein's blog is a good place to follow the politics and policy of health care reform.

Other

Larry Wein describing four of his recent projects.

A short article by the AMA explaining how Medicare payments to physicians are calculated. A series of blog posts by Jason Shafrin I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII giving an overview of Medicare reimbursement based on MedPAC's Payment Basics.

Two ways to search the medical literature are PubMed and Google Scholar.

A rough list of the top medical journals is New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, Public Library of Science (PLOS) Medicine, British Medical Journal (BMJ), and the Archives of Internal Medicine.

An Empiric Estimate of the Value of Life. Discussion in Time including a QA with the chair of Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.

A column generation approach for IMRT optimization. paper.