A (Lower Cost) Healthcare Industry to Deal With a (Higher Cost) Healthcare Industry

By MARC-DAVID MUNK, MD I was recently on the phone with a medical device company executive who was describing his company’s efforts to develop a non-invasive diagnostic device that could quantify the degree of cirrhosis in a patient with liver illness.  It’s technology that his firm sees as timely given the recent introduction of Solavdi and other Hepatitis C therapies: the device will be offered as a way for healthcare systems (and insurers) to risk-stratify a bolus of patients who are waiting for hepatitis C antiviral therapy. As background: Sovaldi was really the first pharmaceutical therapy to give healthcare economists serious heartburn.  It won’t be the last.  The coming era of targeted cancer therapy is extraordinary (and welcome).  My mother died from melanoma only 1-2 years before the extraordinary growth of knowledge of this lethal skin cancer led to a rash of new therapies– medications that target things like BRAF, MEK, C-KIT proteins. But, these and other oncology drugs are fabulously expensive. My mother’s therapy would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is an expense insurers and risk-bearing systems were’t expecting to take on. Now, I don’t know how viable this device-assisted triage approach will be, either technically or practically– nor whether it will fly given patient expectations.  But I hold it out as a great example of an emerging trend: the emergence of new technologies introduced to the healthcare...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: THCB Marc-David Munk Source Type: blogs