Adopting New Medical Technology

What information and decision-making processes determine how and whether an experimental medical technology becomes accepted and used? Adopting New Medical Technology reviews the strengths and weaknesses of present coverage and adoption practices, highlights opportunities for improving both the decision-making processes and the underlying information base, and considers approaches to instituting a much-needed increase in financial support for evaluative research. Essays explore the nature of technological change; the use of technology assessment in decisions by health care providers and federal, for-profit, and not-for-profit payers; the role of the courts in determining benefits coverage; strengthening the connections between evaluative research and coverage decision-making; manufacturers' responses to the increased demand for outcomes research; and the implications of health care reform for technology policy.

Americans praise medical technology for saving lives and improving health. Yet, new technology is often cited as a key factor in skyrocketing medical costs. This volume, second in the Medical Innovation at the Crossroads series, examines how economic incentives for innovation are changing and what that means for the future of health care. Up-to-date with a wide variety of examples and case studies, this book explores how payment, patent, and regulatory policiesâ€"as well as the involvement of numerous government agenciesâ€"affect the introduction and use of new pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and surgical procedures. The volume also includes detailed comparisons of policies and patterns of technological innovation in Western Europe and Japan. This fact-filled and practical book will be of interest to economists, policymakers, health administrators, health care practitioners, and the concerned public.

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This book aims to study the factors effecting the adoption and diffusion of Health Information Technology (HIT) innovation. It analyses the adoption processes of various tools and applications, particularly Electronic Health Records (EHR), highlighting the impact on various sectors of the healthcare system, such as physicians, administration and patient care, while also identifying the various pitfalls and gaps in the literature. With the various challenges currently facing the United States healthcare system, the study, adoption and diffusion of healthcare technology innovation, particularly HIT, is imperative to achieving national goals. This book is organized into three sections. Section one reviews theories and applications for the diffusion of Health Care Technologies. Section two evaluates EHR technology, including the barriers and enables in adoption and alternative technologies. Finally, section three examines the factors impacting the adoption of EHR systems. This book will be a key source for students, academics, researchers, practitioners, professionals and policy-makers.

The very rapid pace of advances in biomedical research promises us a wide range of new drugs, medical devices, and clinical procedures. The extent to which these discoveries will benefit the public, however, depends in large part on the methods we choose for developing and testing them. Modern Methods of Clinical Investigation focuses on strategies for clinical evaluation and their role in uncovering the actual benefits and risks of medical innovation. Essays explore differences in our current systems for evaluating drugs, medical devices, and clinical procedures; health insurance databases as a tool for assessing treatment outcomes; the role of the medical profession, the Food and Drug Administration, and industry in stimulating the use of evaluative methods; and more. This book will be of special interest to policymakers, regulators, executives in the medical industry, clinical researchers, and physicians.

New medical technologies--pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and procedures--often allow great improvements in the outcomes of medical care, but they are also widely believed to be a major cause of increasing costs. Selective adoption of new technologies is crucial in the quest to control health care costs while preserving or enhancing the quality of care. This report focuses on evaluation and adoption of innovative procedures and medical devices by managed care organizations (MCOs). The project had two primary objectives: (1) to understand current MCO processes for making coverage, medical-necessity, and payment decisions and how device developers and manufacturers prepare for and participate in these processes; and (2) to identify ways that private, voluntary action by the managed-care and medical-device industries might improve--for the benefit of society--these processes. The core data are from confidential interviews with eight companies that develop and manufacture medical devices and medical directors of nine MCOs. The findings should be of interest to medical-device developers and manufacturers, managed care organizations, public-policy makers, and researchers and analysts. A major impediment to socially appropriate adoption of emerging medical technologies is limited information about the performance of these technologies in day-to-day medical practice. The authors discuss prospects for improving four elements of information availability: --Developing better information before market introduction --Learning more from experience after market introduction --Evaluating and synthesizing clinical information --Disseminating information. They also discuss several other issues that warrant consideration: --Aligning private incentives of MCOs and payers with social values --Enhancing MCO capabilities to evaluate technologies and make decisions --Improving decisions by physicians --Reducing use of inappropriate or obsolete technologies --Reducing costs of decisionmaking for manufacturers and MCOs --Improving manufacturer understanding of the market environment --Helping MCOs and employers anticipate what is in the pipeline.

This is the second book in the series of books that we edit on the Management of Medical Technology (MMT) published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. The fIrst book Managing Technology in Health Care offered a broad-brushed view of the topics involved in the new and exciting area of MMT that we have launched. A group of distinguished scholars contributed to the fIrst book. While working on the first book in the series, and on a variety of articles in MMT, we began to realize that there is an urgent need for a comprehensive and highly focused book which will introduce and define the area of MMT. In addition, we had just completed the two studies of MMT in American hospitals, and had a magnificent database fully analyzed. With three months left in the first author's sabbatical, and thanks to the encouragement from our editor at Kluwer, Gary Folven, we took to the task of writing this book. The merging in this book of the description of a new intellectual space, and the write-up of the results from our MMT studies have created a unique blend of very attractive reading material. The reader will find this book to be a fascinating adventure into a newly-created area of intellectual endeavor, coupled with fIndings about how the health care delivery system manages teclUlology. Regardless of the reader's background, this book will certainly be of interest, as it links the medical and business frameworks.