{"id":434,"date":"2008-10-24T11:29:29","date_gmt":"2008-10-24T15:29:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=434"},"modified":"2008-10-24T11:29:29","modified_gmt":"2008-10-24T15:29:29","slug":"healthcare-baseball-and-operations-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2008\/10\/24\/healthcare-baseball-and-operations-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Healthcare, Baseball, and Operations Research"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times<\/em> had an op-ed today<\/a> about health care written by Billy Beane<\/a>, Newt Gingrich<\/a>, and John Kerry<\/a>.\u00a0 Billy is the general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team and is the primary subject of the book Moneyball<\/em><\/a>, which looked at how a new look at statistics affects a baseball team’s decisions.\u00a0 What a strange group of coauthors!\u00a0 Gingrich and Kerry are politicians from the opposite sides of the political spectrum.\u00a0 My wife (who pointed out the article to me) thought Gingrich and Kerry were strange coauthors:\u00a0 add in Beane and you are verging on an alternative universe.<\/p>\n

The authors argue that health care has got to take a better look at the data, just like baseball teams look at player data.<\/p>\n

Remarkably, a doctor today can get more data on the starting third baseman on his fantasy baseball team than on the effectiveness of life-and-death medical procedures. Studies have shown <\/span>that most health care is not based on clinical studies of what works best and what does not \u2014 be it a test, treatment, drug or technology. Instead, most care is based on informed opinion, personal observation or tradition.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They give a number of examples on what happens when people really look at data:<\/p>\n

…a health care system that is driven by robust comparative clinical evidence will save lives and money. One success story is Cochrane Collaboration, a nonprofit group that evaluates medical research. Cochrane performs systematic, evidence-based reviews of medical literature. In 1992, a Cochrane review found that many women at risk of premature delivery were not getting corticosteroids, which improve the lung function of premature babies. Based on this evidence, the use of corticosteroids tripled. The result? A nearly 10 percentage point drop in the deaths of low-birth-weight babies and millions of dollars in savings by avoiding the costs of treating complications.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They conclude with a call for looking at the stats:<\/p>\n

America\u2019s health care system behaves like a hidebound, tradition-based ball club that chases after aging sluggers and plays by the old rules: we pay too much and get too little in return. To deliver better health care, we should learn from the successful teams that have adopted baseball\u2019s new evidence-based methods. The best way to start improving quality and lowering costs is to study the stats.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The authors are clearly right.\u00a0 There seems to be great value to looking at the statistics, and this is a necessary step towards rationalizing the system.\u00a0 The key is making better decisions.\u00a0 Some of these decisions seem pretty obvious.\u00a0 But as the decision making gets more complicated, operations research comes into play.\u00a0 To go back to the baseball analogy, Beane discovered that players with high “on-base percentage” were undervalued by the market, who were paying big money for sluggers (players who hit home runs) instead.\u00a0 An obvious better decision is to buy up more of the undervalued players.\u00a0 A more complicated decision would be to form a team that maximized overall output for a given budget constraint.\u00a0 More complicated still would be forming a team relative to a budget constraint that was affected by team performance.\u00a0 These more complicated decisions are not the result of a simple rule (“Buy high OBP players”) but rather the result of much more complicated models.<\/p>\n

Managing health care, by its nature, requires complicated decision processes.\u00a0 And that is where operations research comes in (and why I think OR in health care and medicine are two great areas for our field).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times had an op-ed today about health care written by Billy Beane, Newt Gingrich, and John Kerry.\u00a0 Billy is the general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team and is the primary subject of the book Moneyball, which looked at how a new look at statistics affects a baseball team’s decisions.\u00a0 What … Continue reading “Healthcare, Baseball, and Operations Research”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-medicine","category-or-in-the-press"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}