Hilltop Presents at International Mental Health Policy and Economics Conference

Hilltop Senior Research Analyst Michael T. Abrams, MPH, presented a paper at the Tenth Workshop on Costs and Assessment in Psychiatry on March 27, 2011, in Venice, Italy. The international workshop was organized in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), and national governmental institutions, such as the US NIMH, the UK Department of Health, and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Abrams’ presentation, entitled Correlates to Antipsychotic Medication Switching among U.S. Medicaid Clients with Schizophrenia, described a method of summarizing administrative data to quantify switching events among persons with schizophrenia who use common medications for treating that illness. The work also explored demographic and drug type correlations to such medication switching. David S. Salkever, PhD, Professor of Public Policy at UMBC, was a co-author on this work.

Salkever and Abrams presented a second paper at this same conference entitled Antipsychotic Switching and Heterogeneity in Treatment Costs for Persons with Schizophrenia in the Maryland Medicaid Program. This study examined cost impacts of different antipsychotic drugs used to treat persons with schizophrenia, and furthermore considered the impact of switching medication vs. stable therapy. The work included comparisons of standard ordinary least squared (OLS) regressions with instrumental variable approaches to consider the differential impacts of individual antipsychotics, as well as conventionals vs. atypicals. For more information, contact Michael Abrams.

April 7, 2011