Author: Avalon Health Economics LLC

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...

Avalon CEO John Schneider presents on “The Economics of Molecular Diagnostics” at the University of California Berkeley’s School of Public Health. The lecture covered the basics of molecular diagnostics followed by a more detailed assessment of the costs and benefits of molecular diagnostics. Discussions centered around the value of diagnostics, and how payers and patients...

The demand for medical care services in the U.S. has long been the envy of other industries. Americans are generally not accustomed to going without, typically despise most non-market forms of rationing, and don’t like government telling them what they can and can’t have. Beneath this culture of consumption lie several layers of public and...

Similar to drug and device markets, a critical part of the success of novel diagnostics is educating providers on clinical and therapeutic utility. However, unlike pharmaceutical drugs, the ordering of a diagnostic test does not necessarily imply a change in provider behavior or a change in treatment strategy. It’s a bit like whether a tree...

Avalon team publishes study of the U.S. cost impact of procalcitonin testing in acute respiratory infections. In the inpatient setting, the costs of procalcitonin guided compared to usual care for the one million member cohort was $ 2,083,545, compared to $ 2,780,322, resulting in net savings of nearly $ 700,000 to the IDN for 2014....