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> and deliver way more procedures Diagnostic imaging companies - each of the big ones (Siemens, GE, Philips) offer in-house financing for MRI, CT, etc., that t
by FireBeyond 1y ago
> and deliver way more procedures
Diagnostic imaging companies - each of the big ones (Siemens, GE, Philips) offer in-house financing for MRI, CT, etc., that they advertise to physicians. They also all offer specialist consulting help to facilitate you getting a CoN (Certificate of Need) for your facility. Hell, they also will help you find other physicians in your area who'd like to go in on setting up a DI facility (and will assist with spinning up the practice).
We then find that physicians who own a DI practice (or a share in one) refer their patients to diagnostic imaging at rates several standard deviations above other physicians and at rates that are "statistically improbable" when correlated to underlying ICD-10 diagnostic codes.
Upton Sinclair comes to mind ("It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it").
- tptacek 1y agoMy favorite statistic is that there are more MRI machines in Massachusetts than there are in all of Canada.
- nradov 1y agoIs that a good thing or a bad thing? MRI machines are expensive, but very useful for certain conditions and with zero radiation exposure. We see a lot of affluent Canadians coming to the USA as medical tourists for imaging procedures and elective surgery due to long queues at home.
- tptacek 1y agoIt's an indicator. By many accounts, the US drastically overuses imaging. For instance: it's not unlikely that a patient presenting with persistent back pain will be imaged quickly in the US. That imaging service is itself expensive and a cost driver, but far worse are the procedures the imaging results drive, most of which wouldn't be prescribed over the border in Canada. We do not on the whole get better results for back pain here! Another example, though with a less comical indicator than the MRI thing: at least up until recently, hernia repairs in Europe were all inpatient procedures. The US innovated on laparoscopic hernia repair that's done outpatient. This is by itself a very good thing! But the knock-on result is that the US now delivers way more hernia repairs; we do medically unnecessary hernia repair because we made it so easy to do. None of these are my insights; they're just things you learn about if you read and listen to podcasts about the problems with our health care economics.
- willhslade 1y agoHey! You got it right!
- tptacek 1y agoIt's almost like I wasn't commenting in bad faith or out of ignorance in the first place.