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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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

During the U.S. “State of the Union” address this past week, President Obama devoted some time to emphasizing the importance of “personalized medicine,” referring to the rapid pace of innovation and the high expectations for the role molecular diagnostics in the U.S. health care system: “I want the country that eliminated polio and mapped the…