ITA in the News

The COVID-19 Simulator , developed by Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston Medical Center and Georgia Tech, was launched in April 2020 to help health policymakers and practitioners make decisions regarding policy and strategy related to the novel coronavirus pandemic. The original tool shows how lifting or continuing physical distancing measures can impact a state’s number of COVID-19 positive tests, hospitalizations and death.

Since launching, the collaborators have expanded on its offerings to help policymakers make decisions at a county level. In this Q&A, Jagpreet Chhatwal, PhD , associate director of the Institute for Technology Assessment at Mass General, describes the new simulation tools available to lawmakers, how the tools can help make opening/closing decisions and his thoughts on the outlook for the upcoming surge of the pandemic.

We hoped that Covid-19 would be a seasonal infection. We hoped wrong.

by Roxanne Khamsi, published on Wired.com

The past few days have brought alarming news about the state of the pandemic in the US. Hospitalizations from Covid-19 reached new highs in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, while case totals have been on the rise in recent weeks for more than half the country. But summer starts this weekend, and there’s still good reason to believe that this infection might be seasonal. If that’s the case, then hot and humid weather could attenuate the spread of the disease. Case counts would fall off. Any “second wave” would be delayed.That’s a good thing, right?

New tool can detect COVID-19 outbreaks in U.S. counties that host in-person football events

By MGH News and Public Affairs October 15, 2020

For many people living with the crushing consequences of Covid-19, the summer offers a tantalizing possibility: If the coronavirus behaves like the seasonal flu, warm weather could substantially weaken the virus and allow normal life to resume. President Trump predicted exactly this outcome in February, claiming the virus would “miraculously” go away by April as temperatures rose.

Health care models allow policy makers — and, to varying degrees, all of us — to posit a range of “what-ifs” on issues that change the course of economies and lives. In late April, as confirmed coronavirus cases, illnesses and deaths spread unevenly across the United States, a team of researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)/Harvard Medical School, Boston Medical Center and Georgia Institute of Technology launched a COVID-19 simulator designed to illuminate different social distancing scenarios.

A panel of four radiologists made a case for the efficacy of cost-effectiveness analyses (CEA) at a Tuesday morning RSNA 2019 session, by presenting calculation models, examples of findings using CEA models, and research supporting the CEA concept.

The lead presenter, Dr. Pari Pandharipande, director of the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment, and abdominal radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, stressed that CEAs are not for use at the patient level. Instead, CEA is a tool for physicians to advise policymakers on the sweet spot between costs and outcome benefits.

Lung cancer screening with low-dose computed tomography is cost-effective, regardless of the age at which individuals stop being screened. Primary care physicians should encourage ever-smokers meeting the criteria for annual screening to adhere to this practice. Findings from a comparative modeling study are published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

ITA researchers Mohammad Jalali and Vahab Vahdat worked with colleagues from Northeastern University, MIT, MGH, and Yale to develop a simulation model to determine if adopting customized, individually made knee implants would result in substantial reductions in the cost of total knee arthroplasty (TKA) procedures, recovery, readmissions and revision surgeries.

Dr. Carrie Lubitz received notice from the NIH that her R01 (Thyroid Nodule Treatment Optimization: A Personalized Approach) was being converted to an R37 award under a mechanism known as the Method to Extend Research In Time (MERIT). The R37 conversion provides long-term grant support to investigators whose research competence and productivity are distinctly superior and who are likely to continue to perform in an outstanding manner. Individual investigators may not apply for a MERIT award. Recipients are selected by program staff and/or members of the cognizant National Advisory Council/Board, who identify candidates during the course of reviewing competing research grant applications prepared and submitted in accordance with regular PHS requirements. Among the 31,000 active R01s in the U.S., there are only 500 active R37 awards. Moreover, as of July 31, 2019, there were only 19 active R37s at Partners, 10 at the MGH (exclusive of Dr. Lubitz’ award). 

The Academy for Radiology & Biomedical Imaging Research recently announced the Dr. Pari V. Pandharipande, MD, MPH is one of 37 researchers selected to receive the Academy’s 2019 Distinguished Investigator Award. This prestigious honor recognizes individuals for their accomplishments in the field of medical imaging.