Monika Safford
Joan and Sanford I. Weill Department
of Medicine
Weill Cornell Medical College
1300 York Ave
New York, NY 10065
E-Mail: 
Institutional Affiliation: Weill Cornell Medical College
NBER Working Papers and Publications
February 2018 | Effects of Expanding Health Screening on Treatment - What Should We Expect? What Can We Learn?
with Rebecca Mary Myerson, Darius Lakdawalla, Lisandro D. Colantonio, David Meltzer: w24347
Screening interventions can produce very different treatment outcomes, depending on the reasons why patients had been unscreened in the first place. Economists have paid scant attention to these complexities and their implications for evaluating screening programs. In this paper, we propose a simple economic framework to guide policy-makers and analysts in designing and evaluating the impact of screening on treatment uptake. We apply these insights to several salient empirical examples that illustrate the different kinds of effects screening programs might produce. Our empirical examples focus on contexts relevant to the top cause of death in the United States, heart disease. We find that currently undiagnosed patients differ from currently diagnosed patients in important ways, leading to ... |
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