Author: Avalon Health Economics LLC

Prices in health care vary widely even within the same local market and for similar tests and treatments. This reflects differences among providers in their ability and willingness to leverage bargaining power against private insurers. For their part, consumers and patients often have been indifferent to price since they have been well covered by insurance....

In an earlier blog, we reviewed the recent book by one of Avalon’s directors, James Robinson. Robinson’s book, entitled “Purchasing Medical Innovation: The Right Technology, for the Right Patient, at the Right Price” seeks to unpack the often precarious relationships among medical device makers, the purchasers of those devices, the insurers, who are often the...

The annual AdvaMed Med Tech Conference is the leading MedTech Conference in North America, bringing more than 1,000 companies together to exchange knowledge and ideas on business development, capital formation, economic evaluation, pricing and reimbursement, educational opportunities and networking. Please let us know if you like to meet and discuss your health economics needs. To...

Much of the public media and even a substantial part of the medical literature operates on the assumption that there is a shortage of physicians in the U.S., including those specializing in primary care, intensive care, and surgery. One study, for example, estimated that the physician shortfall in the U.S. would reach 90,000 by 2025.[1]...

Today’s clinical laboratory can do much more than you think. Advances in molecular diagnostics, genetics and biomarkers have ushered in a new era of clinical laboratory capabilities. Along with these advances, however, are higher laboratory expenditures. The U.S. Medicare program spent $6.5 billion annually on laboratory in 2006. By 2010, the program was spending $8.2...

In recent years, the food industry has seen a boom in the “free from” category, including a myriad of ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors, toxic pesticides, artificial hormones, antibiotics, and GMOs. One such product that has been particularly demonized recently is gluten. Celebrities from Miley Cyrus to former president Bill Clinton...

Avalon Health Economics will be presenting in several venues at the 18th Annual European Congress of the International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) in Milan, 7-11 November 2015 at the Milano Congressi (MiCo ). The Avalon presentations include: (1) teaching the first ISPOR short course on the Economics of Diagnostics; (2) moderating an...

Avalon at ISPOR: John Schneider, Cara Scheibling, and Ivana Stojanovic will be attending the annual meeting of the International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research in Philadelphia this week, May 16 through May 20. The title of this year’s meeting is “Integrating Big Data, Patient Data, and Cost-Effectiveness into Clinical Practice: Promise and Prospects.” If...

In recent years, there has been a small but measurable slowdown in the rate of increase in health expenditures, both here in the U.S. and abroad. The slowdown is largely attributable to a higher level of commitment on the part of payers to increase enrollee cost sharing and control access to high cost treatments.[1-3] If...

According to the American Cancer Society, the financial costs of cancer are high for both the person with cancer and for society as a whole. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) estimated the 2009 overall annual costs of cancer in the U.S. to be $216.6 billion, consisting of $86.6 billion in direct costs and $130...