science to profits

Tag: Healthcare costs

  • Healthcare reform, and “cheap colonoscopy”

    My work last month took me to several conferences and locations, and I have come back with a collection of fascinating snapshots illustrating different ways in which the US healthcare ecosystem is responding to the pressures for change that are being exerted on it. Some are depressing, but some offer exciting glimpses of very positive…

  • 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…

  • Primary care health, USA: the 401(k) model?

    I have been spending a lot of time recently exploring Health 2.0 (digital health, quantified self, wireless health, etc) and trying to read the tea leaves about how the US healthcare system is likely to change, as total costs continue on a seemingly unsupportable long term trajectory. I see an interesting analogy to the history…