MASSDEVICE ON CALL | Accountable Care Organizations, President Obama’s central idea for getting quality medical care at less cost, met more resistance as hospitals say actual costs could be 10 times more than projected.
Recent Medicare projections put costs at around $1.8 million in the first year, but the American Hospital Association says the programs are more likely to cost between $11 and $26 million. The AHA estimates came from studies that ran prior to the release of ACO regulations.
The program aims to save money and improve the quality of health care by paying doctors based on performance rather than per procedure. The AHA warns that Medicare numbers fail to consider costs of participation in the program when projecting a hospital’s savings.
The AHA’s cross-check comes on the heels of ongoing protests of the president’s healthcare overhaul, as key health care providers called his administration’s initial blueprint for ACOs so complex it’s unworkable.
The ACO program is slated to launch on a voluntary basis on Jan. 1.
Feds uncover scheme to sell nearly 6,000 boxes of fake diabetes test strips
A Florida man has been charged with trafficking counterfeit OneTouch diabetes test strips made by Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ).
Federal prosecutors allege that Jacques Duplessis purchased the fake strips from China and the U.K., and distributed them to customers in the U.S. and Canada.
According to Dow Jones news service, JNJ hasn’t found evidence of any fake strips in the U.S. market in the last three years but the problem persists in other countries, most recently in India earlier this year.
JNJ started fighting diabetes test counterfeiting rings in 2006, following the discovery of fakes circulating in the U.S. market.
NHS bears financial burden of faulty medical implants
England’s National Health Service is facing a hefty bill as thousands of people require expensive procedures to remove faulty medical implants, according to The Telegram newspaper.
In 2009 the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, responsible for monitoring medical equipment, received more than 9,000 reports of "adverse incidents," according to the paper. Nearly 2,000 of those reports involved serious injury and more than 200 resulted in death.
The NHS now faces the cost of removal for devices failing years earlier than expected. “Unlike kettles and toasters, which come with warranties, when devices do not last as long as they ought to companies are not necessarily held financially responsible,” Deborah Cohen, investigations editor at the The British Medical Journal, told The Telegram.
Tech timelines: can we predict which technologies will advance more quickly than others?
Using mathematical models, researchers at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. found that technologies with greater complexity change more slowly over time. The study’s authors say their models could help policymakers predict which technologies to bank on for future development.
