News and Event

According to Jagpreet Chhatwal, principal investigator of the COVID-19 Simulator Website and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, football games can also accelerate the spread of COVID-19 because fans often travel from neighboring counties to attend them.

The COVID-19 Policy Simulator — created by researchers at MGH, Harvard Medical School, Georgia Tech, and Boston Medical Center — predicts that with the current level of restrictions, there could be more than 800 new cases every day in Massachusetts. Under new stay-at-home orders, the computer model suggests the number of daily cases could be brought below 325.

There’s no crystal ball that can tell us what’s going to happen next with COVID-19, but there are computer models that provide some insight into the direction things are heading. Scientists at Boston Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital have developed a COVID-19 outbreak predictor computer model, and it’s showing that infection rates are increasing at an alarming rate in many Massachusetts counties. WGBH News Reporter Craig LeMoult spoke with Benjamin Linas, associate professor at the Boston University School of Medicine and an infectious disease physician at Boston Medical Center, who is one of the computer model’s developers. The transcript below has been edited for clarity.

Ever wondered what machine learning is and how it might be applied to health economics and outcomes research (HEOR)? This informative workshop presented a technical overview of machine learning techniques, examples of machine learning conducted in healthcare and relevant to health economics, and some potential uses for machine learning moving forward.

Project lead Jagpreet Chhatwal, a professor at Harvard Medical School, said the biggest challenge the researchers faced was accounting for unknown variables — considerations that are becoming more apparent as the pandemic continues.

According to the COVID-19 Simulator developed by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Georgia Tech, the total deaths from the coronavirus in the six New England states could reach some 90,000 by the end of August if all restrictions were lifted.

For the past three years, various governments and patient advocacy groups have clamored for lower-cost hepatitis C medicines, given the high cure rate for these pricey new drugs. Now, a new study finds that upfront treatment with cheaper generic versions can offer a substantial payback.

Dr. Jagpreet Chhatwal, at Massachusetts General Hospital, calculates that the new, more effective therapy will cause the overall cost of treating patients with that leukemia to balloon by nearly six times. That's due to both the cost of the new drug and the growing number of patients who will live longer and thus will need continuous treatment.

Jagpreet Chhatwal of Mass General Hospital, who led the study, tells me the new treatment has tripled the cost of treating a patient with this one type of cancer. Chhatwal said, "We find that on average the lifetime cost of treatment with these new therapies would be $600,000."

“It’s a disturbing concern,” said one of the study authors, Jagpreet Chhatwal, who is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a senior scientist at the Institute for Technology Assessment at Massachusetts General Hospital. “And it’s happening now in CLL… Drug prices have to come down to make them more effective and more affordable.”