Value-based care has been proposed as a way to lower healthcare costs while improving outcomes. Attention to this model seems to be growing. The New England Journal of Medicine has an excellent overview on value-based healthcare. Medical device design can have an impact on the successful transition to a value-based model. One way that medical [...]
We all know that one person, the one who gets squeamish around needles and blood. They see the needle or the blood being drawn, and their face goes pale while their eyes get huge. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t like needles going inside me anymore than the next person. My arm veins actually [...]
Here is a fresh article from Treehugger about a clever idea out of Russia: Do 30 squats and get free subway fare. It seems like a great way to incentivize people to exercise. I would certainly exercise more if I got paid for it.
A number of hospital systems are establishing centers to help launch med-tech startups. The Cleveland Clinic is a pioneer in this area, with their Innovations Center. St Joseph Health has just launched the Innovation Institute, the heart of which is the Innovation Lab, which will incubate inventions that have come from the health system’s staff. [...]
Taking responsibility for your own well being is going to be almost mandatory in the future. No longer will we have the luxury of being passive consumers of healthcare managed and directed by others. Preventative healthcare will be extremely important. We will need to be active participants in our own care, and we will need [...]
Medtech Insider points to a study just released by Ernst & Young that provides more evidence that what we have been saying for some time now is gaining acceptance: the best way to drive down health care costs is to engage in preventative care so that people remain healthy longer. The E&Y report emphasizes that [...]
Microsoft and GE recently announced partnership in their “Caradigm” venture, scheduled to launch in 2012. From the press release: “Caradigm will be aimed at driving a paradigm shift in the delivery of care by enabling health systems and professionals to use real-time, systemwide intelligence to improve healthcare quality and the patient experience. Upon formation, the [...]
Your own health, that is. The days of trusting your care solely to your doctor is quickly coming to an end. We’ve been saying this for awhile, but more and more people are picking up on the fact that patients will need to become partners in their own health care. Medical insurance premiums are not [...]
In the coming years, we will be hearing a lot about coordination of care. Two recent items highlight this trend. First, is the concept of the patient-centered medical home (PCMH). Basically, the PMCH model calls for each patient to be under the care of a personal physician who is responsible for coordinating that patient’s care [...]
More and more devices are showing up that track your vital signs, calories burned, etc. etc. As we’ve been predicting, personal informatics is gaining ground in the popular culture as a means of staying healthy. This is a subset of the move toward preventative care, which will become more and more important as the costs [...]
I was going to wait until next week to post on the many recent developments that have come to the fore regarding non-invasive sensing of physiological functions and how that will impact medical device design. But this article by Frank Moss from yesterday’s NY Times is too timely not to give a shout-out too. It’s also [...]
If you’re involved in medical device design, the annual Medtech conference put on by Ibiliti is a great forum for learning about current issues in the field. Their 2011 conference was held on November 1st and 2nd in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. This year’s event was again very informative, with a good cross-section of speakers [...]
The New York Times reports that Massachusets is working on a plan that would provide flat “global payments” to health provider networks that would act as incentives for them to keep their patients well. The hope is that the system will replace the current fee-for-service model that tends to increase medical costs because it reimburses [...]
Over at Medicalmegatrends.blogspot.com, Dr. Stephen Schimpff has some cogent thoughts about the root causes of rising healthcare costs in the United States. Doctor Schimpff reinforces my own view: that healthcare costs won’t be brought under control until we incentivize staying healthy. Read his post here: http://bit.ly/khNUYp.
Medicaldevicestoday.com sights a study by Parks Associates that predicts that mobile health applications will soon be generating $5.5 billion in revenues by 2015. Of that amount, they say that 16% will be wellness/fitness related and 46% will be for chronic care monitoring and sevices. I hope the stats in their prediction are reversed. Only by [...]
Most of us agree that the continuing growth in the cost of health care must be brought under control. In our efforts to contain those costs, we will see the biggest savings if we can get people to live healthy lifestyles, preventing the need for interventionary care in the first place. Although it is receiving [...]
People don’t have jobs so they can’t spend. The rampant consumerism that fueled the industrial age economy is gone. The service economy didn’t stand up to its hype. The information age produced the dot-com bubble. Forget about the jobs of the future -- where will the jobs of the present come from? How will the [...]
With health care reform so much in the news these days, cost containment is a big concern. Complying with the government’s regulations surrounding medical devices undoubtedly adds substantial cost to their development. How significant are those costs, though, in the overall scheme of caring for people’s health? Just about a year ago, former Congressional Budget [...]