Paul C. Langley, Ph.D., Adjunct Professor, College of Pharmacy, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN The Maimon Working Papers are free to download (in PDF format) at the bottom of the page.
Read MoreJoseph Heller’s Catch 22, published in 1961, has been described as both a dark comedy and absurdist fiction, and as one of the iconic novels of the 20th century. The term Catch 22, is defined by the Collins English Dictionary as follows: “If you describe a situation as a catch-22, you mean it is an impossible situation because you cannot do one thing until you do another thing, but you cannot do the second thing until you do the first thing.” As
Read MorePaul C. Langley, Ph.D., Adjunct Professor, College of Pharmacy, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN The Maimon Working Papers are free to download (in PDF format) at the bottom of the page.
Read MoreIt is unusual, after 46 years of database development to point out that there is a basic flaw that unfortunately renders the entire exercise irrelevant. This is the situation that the Tufts University Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (CEA) database finds itself in once questions of the axioms of fundamental measurement are raised. The concern rests on two considerations: first, the properties, from a measurement perspective, of the direct and indirect multiattribute preference instrument that have been widely accepted and applied in modeling over the
Read MorePaul C. Langley, Ph.D., Adjunct Professor College of Pharmacy, University of Minnesota, MN The Maimon Working Papers are free to download (in PDF format) at the bottom of the page.
Read MoreMaimon Research LLC has a long standing advisory and consulting relationship with a leading patient advocacy and support group: Patients Rising and Patients Rising Now. Under the direction of Ms Terry Wilcox, Patients Rising is focused on advocacy and support for access to quality affordable healthcare while Patients Rising Now is focused on advocacy and support for the rights of patients with chronic and life threatening diseases. For more information on current activities, the links are www.patientsrising.org and www.patientsrisingnow.org
Read MoreIn the US, the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) occupies a special, if not a unique position in promoting economic evaluations of pharmaceutical products that are entirely imaginary. This is not an unusual event. Through ICER’s embrace of the approximate information meme that has dominated health technology assessment for the last 30 years, it is merely trying to emulate agencies in single payer health systems such as the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in the UK who
Read MoreRichard Dawkins in his best seller A Devils Chaplain describes a meme as a mind virus. In common with a computer virus a meme can transmit or propagate from one individual to another with high fidelity if two conditions are met: a readiness to replicate information accurately (ISPOR practice guidelines; textbooks as primers for building imaginary models) and a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information (education programs, graduate studies, sitting at the feet of the leaders in technology assessment). A
Read MoreThe lack of appreciation by those involved in the creation of imaginary value claims in health technology assessment is not only a lack of appreciation of the need to meet the standards of normal science, including the axioms of fundamental evidence but also a failure to appreciate the role of assumptions in creating models; models which should be abandoned unless a case can be made that the modeling is short term and the value claims empirically evaluable. The focus on imaginary models
Read MoreLooking back over the past 40 years, to include the 1980s when the multiattribute instruments were being developed, and consequently, with the smorgasbord of disease specific PROs with many claiming to capture quality of life in that disease state, there is little if any recognition of any understanding of fundamental measurement and the limitations imposed by the respective axioms. The result was a foregone conclusion, which was noted at the time by measurement theorists, that the various instruments would be restricted to
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