IEMS 443 Health Policy Modeling

Fall 2012

Last modified: Mon Nov 19 14:05:44 CST 2012

Lectures: Monday Wedneday 11:00-12:30 in Tech M228

Instructor: Benjamin Armbruster, lastname@northwestern.edu
Office Hours after class in Tech M237 and by appointment.


There is no required textbook.
Syllabus, tentative schedule
2011 course homepage, 2009 course homepage, McCormick Healthcare Engineering website

9/28/2012: Optional Readings

The Science of Scientific Writing

Medical Literature
Two ways to search the medical literature are PubMed and Google Scholar.
The impact factors of journals give a very rough guide to their importance. (For comparison the impact factor of Operations Research is 1.995.)
Online epidemiology slides (the Supercourse at Pitt)

Healthcare Modeling Overview
OR's next top model by Elisa Long and Margaret Brandeau
Larry Wein describing four of his recent projects.

A Global Perspective
Hans Rosling gives a short talk on developing countries at the TED conference.
Global Burden of Disease by the WHO.
report on noncommunicable diseases by the WHO
Northwestern's Global Health center

10/1/2012: Readings

Compartmental models of disease spread: Wikipedia page and an example spreadsheet model
New Haven needle exchange program
Homework: Create a chart showing HIV prevalence over the next five years with and without a needle sharing program.

10/3/2012: Readings

Cost-effectiveness of HIV circumcision.

All the other readings are optional.
Overview of cost-effectiveness by Weinstein et al. The CEA Registry is a resource to find cost-effectiveness studies, cost-effectiveness values, and quality of life adjustment factors.
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.
Medical care component of the CPI-U should be used for inflation adjustment (see column 5 here).

10/5/2012: Readings

Testing for coronary artery disease

10/8/2012: Readings

HIV among men who have sex with men (MSM) by Goodreau et al.
Homework: One person create 10-15 minute presentation giving background and another person create 10-15 minute presentation explaining the paper.

Optional HIV Readings
UNAIDS report
WHO Towards Universal Access
Special issue of Science on HIV in Eastern Europe
Methadone substitution therapy for injection drug users (IDUs)
Drug resistance
WHO survey of drug prices
WHO Guidelines

10/10/2012: Readings

HIV treatment scale-up
Homework: Write a 1-2 page critique of the Goodreau et al. paper.

10/22/2012: Readings

A set of slides giving an overview.
Take a look at the model of drug resistance in the supplement of this paper
Also, a more general look at modeling drug resistance
Homework: The homework is to come up with ideas for modeling papers (any healthcare topic). Write 2 pages about these ideas. The first paragraph (a short paragraph) should give 5 different ideas. Then in the remaining space, take two of these ideas and expand on them, giving details of how you could model them. I will focus on the quality of the ideas.

10/24/2012: Optional Readings

A survey of POMDP applications mentions two healthcare applications
A general POMDP website and wikipedia
Burhan Sandikci's thesis which uses POMDPs and gives an overview of them and how to solve them computationally.
Pascal Poupart's thesis on POMDPs.
A liver transplant example and a breast cancer testing example.

10/29/2012: Optional Readings

Background on two pandemics: 1918 flu pandemic and SARS
The reasonably accurate film Contagion about a pandemic
The CDC weekly report MMWR is where most outbreaks are first reported.
Science paper estimating R0 for the 2009 H1N1 pandemic (note the very fast turnaround of the paper, submitted May 5, accepted May 11)
Two papers about containing a smallpox outbreak by Halloran et al. and Kaplan et al.
Models of geographic spread by Dirk Brockmann (Northwestern): Swine flu forecasts, book chapter, and article
Pandemic flu preparedness plans for Illnois and the US

10/31/2012: Readings

Google flu trends: Google trends, preprint, Nature paper, and supplementary info.
CDC weekly flu report

Radiation Treatment
Journals: Medical Physics and Physics in Medicine and Biology
Matlab environment CERR
Prominent guy in the field
A column generation paper

11/5/2012: Readings

Simple model for selecting number of patients per GP
Dialysis contract design

Optional Readings: High-Level Look at Payments
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.
Presentation by Peter Orzag, head of the Congressional Budget Office. See slides 12 and 13 on the connection between quality and cost.
The Cost Conundrum a New Yorker article by Atul Gawande examining why the US system is so expensive

Optional Readings: Medicare Payments
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.

11/12/2012: Readings

Kidney transplant policy (in OR and in the American Journal of Medicine)
Paired kidney donations: JAMA and MS
Kidney: basics, transplants, data, and essay.
Diabetes Screening and allocating prevention funds

11/14/2012: Readings

Anesthesia risk by Pate-Cornell et al.

11/19/2012: Readings

Scheduling medical residents: paper and the editorial.