Author: Avalon Health Economics LLC

Cancer care is a large part of overall health care expenditures. Of the approximately 18% of U.S. gross domestic product spent on healthcare, more than 5% is attributed to cancer treatments.[1] Considering the premature mortality associated with cancer, the humanistic and economic toll is enormous. Consequently, in recent years there has been increasing attention devoted...

Although the U.S. lacks a centralized health technology evaluation agency, as many of the European countries maintain, in recent years there has been considerable pressure to control the rising costs of new biopharmaceuticals and medical devices.[1-5] After relatively slow growth in the 1960s, U.S. health care expenditures grew intensely in the decades between 1980 and...

Avalon CEO John Schneider, Ph.D. presented at BMO Capital Markets’ “The Year Ahead in Healthcare: Products, Payment and Politics” on December 15, 2015. The day-long symposium was focused on markets for life science products and featured presentations from industry leaders, including Boston Scientific, Medtronic, Abbott and Pfizer. Schneider delivered a lunchtime presentation on the medical...

Avalon Health Economics is happy to announce the addition of Philipp Schuetz, MD, MPH as our Clinical Advisor. He is a board-certified internist and endocrinologist. He has broad clinical and research interests focusing on the application of new developments in endocrinology, infectious diseases, critical illness and general medicine. He has done extensive research on hormones,...

CEO John Schneider presented at the Barclays HealthCare Symposium on 11/20 on the topic of Increasing Need to Demonstrate Economic Value in Medtech.

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...