science to profits

Category: Healthcare opportunities

  • Disease economics: COPD and Pneumonia

    Following on from my last post on asthma, here are the economic details for the other two big respiratory disease expense categories: COPD and Pneumonia.

  • Disease economics: Asthma

    Asthma and COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) show up as the the fifth most costly clinical category in US healthcare at $60+ Billion / yr. (see footnotes for source etc). As with prior posts in this series, I wanted to see if a deeper analysis of the economics suggested possible interesting business opportunities. And I…

  • Disease economics: Backpain

    I was interested to see that Back problems are the ninth most costly clinical category in US healthcare at almost $40B / yr. I chose back pain as the second in my series on disease economics. Most ($31B) of the costs falling into the back problem category come from a single clinical condition code #205 (Spondylosis; intervertebral disc…

  • Disease economics: heart disease

    I wanted to see what insight I could gain by looking a bit deeper into the economics of specific diseases. I started with heart disease. As in prior posts on disease economics, the data comes from AHRQ (details here and here and at bottom). From my post on disease costs, the big heart disease clinical…

  • Disease cost drill down (1)

    To be actionable, I felt it more useful to look at healthcare costs by specific clinical condition, rather than by the general disease groupings of my last post. Here is the graphic I came up with (excluding mental disease categories for now). The 8 red dots represent clinical condition codes with annual expenditures each in…

  • Disease through the eyes of an accountant

    There has been a lot written recently about how some diseases cost the healthcare system more than others, and the fact that some patients (the sick ones and the old ones) cost more than others. I wanted to learn more about which clinical conditions are the big contributors to our national healthcare bill. So, for the…

  • Pre-existing conditions and the future of US healthcare

    “Pre-existing conditions” are (should be?) at the heart of the debate about the two approaches to reforming healthcare financing on display from our Presidential candidates. I found this article by Avik Roy resonated with me.

  • Emergence of the 401(k) health plan?

    The idea that health insurance might follow the trajectory of retirement finance, with employer-covered insurance moving toward a defined contribution, 401(k)-style approach, rather than the current, defined benefit, Pension-like approach is one I have written about before. In today’s news (WSJ) is an article describing how a handful of employers are transforming the way they…

  • Petri dish for innovation: Consumer driven health?

    I’ve written before about the idea that segments of the healthcare system where patients pay for themselves may be a fertile focus for innovation because of the tight connection between “who pays” and “who benefits”. News today reinforces this hypothesis, suggesting there are actually quite a few of these potential customers.

  • Who pays for US healthcare?

    It’s a truism to say that “Patients don’t pay for healthcare” in the USA. And historically, new ventures based on the idea that patients would pay out of their own pockets for healthcare innovations mostly adapted to this reality, or went to the wall. But as I have been watching various healthcare experiments unfold, and…