New Managed Care Findings Reported from Columbia University (When Effects Cannot Be Estimated: Redefining Estimands To Understand the Effects of Naloxone Access Laws): Managed Care

2022 SEP 02 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Research findings on Managed Care are discussed in a new report. According to news reporting originating from New York City, New York, by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “Violations of the positivity assumption (also called the common support condition) challenge health policy research and can result in significant bias, large variance, and invalid inference. We define positivity in the single- and multiple-timepoint (i.e., longitudinal) health policy evaluation setting, and discuss real-world threats to positivity.”

Financial support for this research came from European Commission.

Our news editors obtained a quote from the research from Columbia University, “We show empirical evidence of the practical positivity violations that can result when attempting to estimate the effects of health policies (in this case, Naloxone Access Laws). In such scenarios, an alternative is to estimate the effect of a shift in law enactment (e.g., the effect if enactment had been delayed by some number of years). Such an effect corresponds to what is called a modified treatment policy, and dramatically weakens the required positivity assumption, thereby offering a means to estimate policy effects even in scenarios with serious positivity problems.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “We apply the approach to define and estimate the longitudinal effects of Naloxone Access Laws on opioid overdose rates.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: When Effects Cannot Be Estimated: Redefining Estimands To Understand the Effects of Naloxone Access Laws. Epidemiology, 2022;33(5):689-698. Epidemiology can be contacted at: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Two Commerce Sq, 2001 Market St, Philadelphia, PA 19103, USA. (Lippincott Williams and Wilkins - www.lww.com; Epidemiology - http://journals.lww.com/epidem/pages/default.aspx)

The news editors report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Kara E. Rudolph, Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health, Dept. of Epidemiology, New York, NY 10032, United States. Additional authors for this research include Catherine Gimbrone, Katherine Keyes, Ellicott C. Matthay, Ivan Diaz, Corey S. Davis and Magdalena Cerda.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1097/EDE.0000000000001502. 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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