Keeping Healthcare Simple: What is wrong with healthcare in developed countries?
Finally after getting this blog up, I wanted to post some opinion articles that hopefully stimulate some thoughts within the community.
I am not your average humanitarian. In fact, I have never been to a developing country (hopefully that will change soon). I have never witnessed the healthcare problems in developing countries firsthand. I had never found engineering for developing countries particularly interesting. I was always interested on the cutting edge, what had never been accomplished before. However, my thought process changed a couple months back and I am here to tell you why anyone interested in lowering their healthcare bills (which should be everyone) should be paying attention to healthcare in the developing world.
Healthcare in the United States is in disarray. Incentives throughout the entire industry are misplaced. Many indviduals within the industrys are getting paid for patient volume not for outcomes. Unlike every other article that you read about this topic, I am not here to place blame on one specific group of people. That would be too easy and it would not address the true problem. The entire system is at fault. I would like to offer my opinion from an industry that I am familiar with medical device companies.
Medical companies, which drive much of the technology that is currently in use have also been approaching the process wrong. These medical companies are producing technology which is increasingly more advanced and thus more expensive. However, it does not stop there. Companies are continually driven by their cusomters and business strategies to build sustaining innovations, or innovations that continue to build upon existing products. Unfortunately, these innovations add little or no value to the end users. These high costs associated with development are then passed onto patients which incur a large hospital bill.
For example, the MRI machine, probably one of the most complex and ground-breaking instruments of the last century has become a fixture of the modern hospital. These scans cost well over USD $2,000, but I argue is it really worth it? I’m not here to argue the benefits of the MRI scan, as a graduate student in biomedical engineering, the instrument is one of the most sophisticated I have ever seen. You have to be a genius to understand the technology behind these instruments. In my communication with doctors, they say much of the technology is useful but not necessary. Much simpler ultrasound machines could accomplish many of the same tasks. These scans come at a much cheaper costs, with many of the same benefits. So why are MRI’s so commonly used?
Also these innovative devices are having unintended consequences. Doctors are becoming more and more reliant on these expensive diagnostic tests as opposed to relying on their equally expensive training. I ask…Why are doctors not pooling their knowledge? Why isn’t there more communication? This is a topic for another day.
How does this all relate back to developing countries? Well, I argue they are the only communities which are keeping healthcare simple.
More thoughts to come…