New Findings on Managed Care Discussed by Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Difference-in-Differences for Health Policy and Practice: A Review of Modern Methods): Managed Care

2025 OCT 21 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- New research on Managed Care is the subject of a report. According to news reporting out of Boston, Massachusetts, by NewsRx editors, research stated, “Difference-in-differences (DiD) is a popular observational causal inference method in health policy, employed to evaluate the real-world impact of policies and programs. To estimate treatment effects, DiD relies on a ‘parallel trends assumption’ that treatment and comparison groups would have had parallel trajectories on average in the absence of an intervention.”

Financial supporters for this research include Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institute on Aging, National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, “Recent years have seen both growing use of DiD in health policy and medicine and rapid advancements in DiD methods. To support DiD implementation in these fields, this paper reviews and synthesizes best practices and recent innovations. We provide recommendations to practitioners in four areas: (1) assessing causal assumptions; (2) adjusting for covariates and other approaches to relax causal assumptions; (3) accounting for staggered treatment timing; and (4) conducting robust inference, especially when normal-based clustered standard errors are inappropriate. For each, we explain challenges and common pitfalls in traditional DiD and recommend methods to address these.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “We explore current treatment of these topics through a focused literature review of medical DiD studies.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Difference-in-Differences for Health Policy and Practice: A Review of Modern Methods. Statistics in Medicine, 2025;44. Statistics in Medicine can be contacted at: Wiley, 111 River St, Hoboken 07030-5774, NJ, USA. (Wiley-Blackwell - http://www.wiley.com/; Statistics in Medicine - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1097-0258)

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Ishani Ganguli, Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Additional authors for this research include Shuo Feng, Youjin Lee, John Poe, Andrew Ryan and Alyssa Bilinski.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1002/sim.70247. 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.

Publisher contact information for the journal Statistics in Medicine is: Wiley, 111 River St, Hoboken 07030-5774, NJ, USA.

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