Costs

Generic drug costs remain shackled

Price controls for generic drugs in primary care are likely to remain unchanged for the next year as the european government considers how best to supply the NHS. In 1999, a severe shortage of non-brand name medicines resulted in a 12.5 per cent increase in the cost of prescription drugs for the NHS, significantly higher than the 8 per cent average increase in previous years. // Pharm...

Obesity increases health costs

Obese patients spend more for health care and medications than smokers, as the extra weight poses them many more chronic health hazards. While tobacco is still the nation's principal cause of preventable deaths, the surgeon general warned// that obesity was running a close second. For a more precise look at the resulting costs, Rand Corp. economist Roland Sturm used data from two nati...

High development costs hinder entry of cancer super drugs into the market

Cancer patients in the future could benefit from pharmacogenomics or the field of personalized medicine where therapies could be tailored to suit individual patients. Few drugs which target specific protein receptors in cancer are already in the market and the decoding of the human genome// offers great promise to patients, as the therapy could become more specialized. However, all this comes wi...

Obese Employees Increase Costs For Employers

Research had shown that for obese employees, employers incur an increased cost because of medical expenditures and absenteeism associated with such employees. The findings, which appear in the September/October issue of the American Journal // of Health Promotion, show that for men employed full time in the labor market, the combined annual per capita cost of being obese, including medi...

Hospital Cuts Costs By Moving Cancer Patients To Hotels

UP TO a third of cancer patients at a leading National Health Services (NHS) trust will be moved out of wards and put up in nearby hotels under plans to save tens of millions of pounds on hospital beds in Britain.// According to a report in the Sunday Times, over 100 patients suffering from cancer or blood disorders at University College hospital (UCH) in London have already stayed at NH...

New screening test for MRSA could reduce infections and costs

A team of researchers led by Dr Stephen Harbarth have claimed that a new screening test for MRSA could prove to be useful in reducing the // infection rates in hospitals and cut down the ￡1 billion-a-year cost incurred by the NHS in dealing with the bug. The new test tracks the presence of the "superbug's" DNA in patient swabs. The researchers said that this test was able to reduce the...

Rising Medicare costs

The government is spending large amount of money on the Medicare sector and this is on the rise. The government has to act quickly otherwise the // problem will be blown out of proportion. Health care costs are currently rising and is as high as 16% of gross domestic product and growing faster than the economy. These rising health care costs are to be borne by the individuals, businesse...

Solution For Controlling The Raising Health Costs

According to Allan Hubbard, a close friend of President Bush, a businessman-turned-policy maker, and the "White House's lead pitchman// on the president's health care proposals, he has found the solution for taming rising health costs. He is promoting Bush's proposals to provide bigger tax breaks for health savings accounts ... and make hospitals and doctors prices available to consumers. <...

Technology Can Help Fight Health Care Costs

According to a recent Florida State University study, hospitals can combat spiralling health care costs by investing more in IT// for all hospital operations. According to Ken Lubben, information technology specialist for the two hospitals, Manatee Memorial and Lakewood Ranch Medical Centre, have already made big investments in improved technology in the last few years. He said that,...

Zimbabweans Will Need To Cough Up More on Health Costs

A ruling that had forbidden any increase in the cost of private health care in Zimbabwe has now been lifted. This means, that private healthcare costs// could even double, adding to the problems already prevalent due to high inflation. Specialist fees and GP fees have almost gone up cent percent. Zimbabwe also heads the list of having the highest inflation in the world, a rise equivale...

Plans To Computerise NHS, Costs Thrice

Programs and schemes initiated to computerize NHS with ￡20 billion is becoming late than scheduled by about two and half years//. ‘Plans were begun previous year to make the medical records electronically for 50 million NHS patients, but this will not still be started until 2007 or 2008’ – says the health minister, Lord Warner. NHS programme for IT (NPfIT) really costs more th...

Doctors Attitude and Costs Plays a Vital Role in Boosting Medical Tourism in India

A leading Indian cosmetic surgeon, Narendra Pandya, says he foresees a dramatic rise in medical tourism to India because of not just the low costs involved but a more humane approach towards patients. // "What we are seeing now (in medical tourism) is just the beginning. At the Apollo Victor hospital in Goa, where I do surgery, over 90 percent of the patients are British expatriates,...

Health Care Costs Unaffected by Rebate

A new research has revealed that those who sign up to private health insurance to avoid tax or financial penalties were often younger, healthier and less likely// to be admitted to hospital as private patients. These findings have cast doubt on claims that an increase in the number of people with insurance would relieve pressure on public hospitals. According to Denzil Fie...

Food Costs At Hospitals Show Mystifying Variations

New figures reveal puzzling variations on how hospitals spend for meals for their patients. An area-wise breakdown shows that some health boards are spending four times the amounts spent by others.// The report says that NHS Lothian spends an average of ￡61 on patients' meals per week as compared to the Scottish average of ￡59. According to The Scotsman newspaper, there are...

Transfer of NHS hospital care into the community may not save costs

A group from Bradford's St Luke's Hospital, gauged the cost-benefit of shifting the responsibility of caring for patients from the NHS hospital into the community, and said that there was no major economic savings in such a move. // Indeed cost savings has been the driving force behind the idea of such a shift, but it became clear after studying the costs of rehabilitating 220 senior...

Insurance Data Show High Costs of Persistent Asthma

Patients with persistent asthma incur high medical costs as well as indirect costs for employers, reports a study in the August Journal of Occupational and Environmental// Medicine, official publication of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM). Led by Dr. Gene Colice of Washington Hospital Center, Washington, D.C., the researchers used a large insuran...

Cough costs UK a whopping ￡979m!

The group representing respiratory specialists declared yesterday that coughing costs the UK economy a huge amount of ￡979million annually.// Lost of productivity when sufferers are not well costs approximately ￡875million, while the health service industry loses ￡104million. According to the British Thoracic Society (BTS), this figure does not include “chronic” coughs ca...

In Elderly Patients Lowering Contrast Material Injection Will Reduce Costs

A new study says that in elderly patients who are undergoing multi-detector CT examination of the pancreas and biliary region, doctors may safely reduce the dose of a contrast agent by 10 percent. // Doing this will reduce the costs as well as the risks associated with the tests, according to the study. The Department of Technical Radiology at Nagoya University School of Health Science in Nagoya,...

International Conference on The Costs And Benefits of HIV/AIDS Interventions in Developing Countries to be hosted by Harvard

According to UNAIDS, the available funding for 2006 was $8.9 billion against the need of $14.9 billion. The shortfall forces the national governments to find strategies to maximize the treatment and prevention strategies for their citizens. // The conference will attempt to address the issue through cost benefit and cost effectiveness analysis. The conference, which will be held Wedn...

Kidney Patient Commits Suicide over Treatment Costs

Lucknow: An Uttar Pradesh villager suffering from a serious kidney ailment died Saturday after jumping from the third floor of a premier hospital here//, apparently because he could not afford the high treatment costs. The man jumped out of a window of the nephrology ward of the Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, where he was being treated, hospital sources told...

Unconventional Hospital Costs For Children Affected By Flu

Children's hospitals supports research on flu vaccines.// Getting into the new era of flu season, a recent study had reported that hospitalizing children for influenza might cost up to three or four times of the estimates that were accepted previously. The researchers from Pediatric department of Philadelphia Children's Hospital say ‘their findings have strengthened the econ...

Cancer Care-Patient's Time Costs Studied

According to a new study in the January 3 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the overall cost of patients' time spent on cancer care in 2005 was $2.3// billion in the first year after diagnosis. Several studies have estimated the direct medical costs of cancer care, but few have attempted to include a patient's time associated with cancer care, such as time spent tra...

Health Care Costs - Significant for Abused Women

Women with a history of abuse by intimate partners have significantly higher health care costs //and utilization than women with no history of such abuse, according to a study conducted at Group Health, a Seattle-based health plan. The higher costs and utilization continued long after the abuse ended, the research team from Group Health, the University of Washington (UW), and the Harb...

Drug Therapy can Reduce Preterm Births and Decrease Lifetime Medical Costs

Researchers from MetroHealth Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH found that treating expectant mothers// who have had previous spontaneous preterm births with 17 Alpha Hydroxyprogesterone caproate (17P) and reducing the incidence of another preterm birth would consequently reduce both short-term and lifetime medical costs in offspring by $2 billion per year. The re...

Millions of Children Denied Drug That Costs Less Than $3 a Year

Millions of children with epilepsy in developing countries are being denied an effective drug that costs less than $3 a year, according to an editorial in this weeks BMJ. Professor Emilio Perucca urges governments and non-governmental organisations in developing countries to ensure that effective treatment is available for all. Of the 35 million people with epilepsy w...

Pre-kindergarten TB Testing Costs High

According to a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco the health care system in California could save nearly 1.3 million dollar a year with few adverse public health effects if it discontinued universal tuberculosis skin testing of children entering kindergarten. Over a 20-year period, the study projects that only two additional cases of tuberculosis w...

Interactions Between Food and Drugs Could Lower Drug Costs

Exploiting interactions between food and drugs could dramatically lower the rapidly rising costs of several anticancer drugs, and perhaps many other medications, according to cancer-pharmacology specialists. University of Chicago oncologists Mark Ratain, MD, and Ezra Cohen, MD, call attention to the flip side of recent studies showing how certain foods can alter absorption or delay...

Value Meal Would Lower Drug Costs

Exploiting interactions between food and drugs could dramatically lower the rapidly rising costs of several anticancer drugs, and perhaps many other medications, two cancer-pharmacology specialists suggest in a commentary in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. University of Chicago oncologists Mark Ratain, MD, and Ezra Cohen, MD, call attention to the flip side of recent studies showing...

Right Foods Could Improve Drug Effectiveness, Lower Drug Costs

Combining medicines with the right food could improve the effectiveness of drugs and dramatically lower the rapidly rising costs of treating patients, experts say . University of Chicago oncologists Mark Ratain, MD, and Ezra Cohen, MD, have released their expert comments after examining research that showed taking a breast cancer drug with fatty food, rather than on an empty...

Uninsured Adults Increase Medicare Costs

While the overall cost-effectiveness of Medicare benefits have been much-debated, new data now show that people who were uninsured before receiving benefits at age 65 required more intensive and costlier care than those who had been privately insured prior to receiving Medicare. These findings, from researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMS), appear in the July 12 issue of the New England Journ...

Reduction in Drug Costs

Research in Norway has shown that there have been substantial savings in drug costs since the introduction of a regulation requiring doctors to prescribe the recommended first-line treatment for hypertension (high blood pressure). Since March 2004, family doctors have been reimbursed for drug costs only if they prescribe thiazides as first-line therapy for uncomplicated hypertension,...

Prescription Costs More for Older Men Than Women

Independent research, involving over 3 million Italians, conducted by Henley Management College and the University of Milan has concluded that the prescription costs for men over the age of 65 is significantly higher than it is for women. The primary objective of this study was to make the first step in the modelling of pharmaceutical demand in Italy to improve the governance of pres...