Findings from Johns Hopkins University in the Area of Managed Care Described (Target Trial Emulation for Evaluating Health Policy): Managed Care

2024 NOV 15 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Current study results on Managed Care have been published. According to news originating from Baltimore, Maryland, by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “Target trial emulation is an approach to designing rigorous nonexperimental studies by ‘emulating’ key features of a clinical trial. Most commonly used outside of policy contexts, this approach is also valuable for policy evaluation as policies typically are not randomly assigned.”

Financial support for this research came from NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from Johns Hopkins University, “In this article, we discuss the application of the target trial emulation framework in a policy evaluation context. The policy trial emulation framework includes 7 components: the units and eligibility criteria, definitions of the exposure and comparison conditions, assignment mechanism, baseline (‘time zero’) and follow-up, outcomes, causal estimand, and statistical analysis and assumptions. Policy evaluations that emulate a randomized trial across these dimensions can yield estimates of the causal effects of the policy on outcomes.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “Using the policy trial emulation framework to conduct and report on research design and methods supports transparent assessment of threats to causal inference in nonexperimental studies intended to assess the effect of a health policy on clinical or population health outcomes.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Target Trial Emulation for Evaluating Health Policy. Annals of Internal Medicine, 2024. Annals of Internal Medicine can be contacted at: Amer Coll Physicians, Independence Mall West 6TH And Race St, Philadelphia, Pa 19106-1572, United States.

The news correspondents report that additional information may be obtained from Nicholas J. Seewald, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Sch Publ Hlth, Dept. of Health Policy and Management, Baltimore, MD, United States. Additional authors for this research include Emma E. Mcginty and Elizabeth A. Stuart.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.7326/M23-2440. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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