Structural intervention may be what’s needed to tackle chronic health problems. But big ideas prompt big questions, including: How much will this cost? Who will pay for it? And how do we get ‘buy-in’?
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Obesity, and its evil cousins diabetes and heart disease, are not going to be cured by more doctor visits. It’s going to take a complete remake of our environment.
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Three times as much per-capita healthcare spending as the UK, five times as many CT scans as Germany, twice as much spending in McAllen as El Paso, Texas – what’s going on? Americans are consuming more medicine than is good for them…and evidently getting no healthier than people in other countries who spend and consume far less. But why?
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Everyone loves a bargain but Americans, in particular, are voracious of consumers of, well, just about everything. In our age of budget deficits and exploding healthcare costs, what motivates both doctors and patients to continue pushing healthcare spending through the roof?
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In today’s world of hotel-room crystal meth labs and designer drugs from ‘head shops’, why can’t our best and brightest scientific minds create a life-saving vaccine on target and on time?
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With so much warning of the HIN1 flu pandemic, why don’t governments and the pharma industry have enough vaccine in time for this flu season? As Dr Dennis Gross explains, for vaccines, the process defines the product. Change the process and you might lose clinical efficacy. The processes for vaccine production – even in 2009 – are fraught with sometimes more art than science.
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Getting a drug approval, reimbursement, and access to markets is a long journey, but we are not alone. The focus on this year’s ISPOR EU annual conference was on health technology assessment in different countries. Is an international appraisal system likely in the near future?
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One of the best outcomes of our ever-shrinking world is the opportunity to meet colleagues from other countries, to learn their best practices, share ‘war stories’ of failed attempts, and garner new ideas for solutions in our respective home countries. ISPOR held its annual meeting in Paris, France last week, with a focus on health technology assessment processes worldwide.
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In recent rounds of the US healthcare debate, ‘rational debate’ seems to have been replaced with scare tactics, in the mainstream media at least. The UK healthcare system recently came under heavy criticism by the anti-reform lobby.
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The American public still has surprisingly few details about the proposed legislation for healthcare reform. In this knowledge vacuum, hyperbole and political fighting rush in.
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