science to profits

Tag: Health care

  • Copying what works to reduce healthcare costs

    If, as a country, we cared about improving the ratio of quality to costs in our healthcare system, why wouldn’t we: Look for examples of things that already “work”, either in the USA or abroad; and copy them? In a post yesterday that got me thinking, John Goodman makes the point that: there are real…

  • 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…

  • Managed care returns?

    My last post on healthcare costs looked at how hospital and professional healthcare costs were held flat during the nineties. In todays WSJ, an article asserts this was due largely to managed care, and goes on to describe in some detail how managed care is “returning”, although of course in a much better form. Here is…

  • Best outcomes or most cost effective healthcare?

    I have been thinking for a while now that one of the problems with the dialog about improving the US healthcare system is that we have done a poor job of articulating what we want to accomplish. Do we want healthcare with the best possible outcomes? Or do we want healthcare that represents the optimal allocation…

  • Customer service in healthcare

    Great post by Lisa Suennen this week on the two different worlds of acute disease care and aesthetic medicine. It reminds us that there are really two quite distinct worlds in the US healthcare universe: the world of aesthetic medicine (various elective dermatological procedures; cosmetic surgery, LASIK, and the like), in which by and large…

  • Top healthcare cost categories

    This post examines the size of the different components that make up the total $2.6 Trillion National Healthcare Expenditures (NHE) of the USA. It also looks at the different growth rates of the components. This is the third installment in our series on US healthcare costs. For background to this project, which is all about…

  • Eating the seed-corn of healthcare

    In the prior post in this series, I concluded that controlling healthcare cost growth was about reducing the differential growth rate of NHEPC (compared to GDP per capita) by a couple of percent per year. This made me want to dig deeper into the question of what exactly is NHEPC (National Healthcare Expenditures Per Capita)? I…

  • Healthcare cost growth analysis (1)

    As explained in this prior post, I am working on a project to identify fertile opportunity spaces resulting from runaway healthcare costs. Here is the first installment of my investigation, my first steps to understanding the healthcare cost curves. (For details of data sources see the references at the bottom.) Typical media depiction of healthcare costs…

  • Runaway healthcare costs create opportunities

    We all know US healthcare costs are growing at a rate most consider unsustainable. If you accept the premise that a lot of time and attention will be focused over the next decade on ways to improve healthcare quality and reduce costs (or perhaps reduce costs without reducing quality?), then there are likely to be…