> I firmly believe you could train a smart person to do an x-ray and to reset a bone, put on a cast and to it for under $1K. And it would cost $10K probably in a hospital sans insurance.
Imagine that your solution is a fraction of a percentage point worse than current treatment. Imagine there's 0.1% increase in harm.
The English NHS sees 1m patients every 36 hours.
In 2012 - 2013 there were 9 million ultrasounds.
I wouldn't want to tell those 9,000 people that their treatment was, even though they got harmed, good enough.
And that 9,000 is just in England.
If you want to save money on ultrasound spending you probably want to reduce the numbers of ultrasounds being taken. Healthy pregnant women with no problems only need one ultrasound, but in some places they're offered very many more.
> In 2014, usage in the U.S. of the most common fetal-ultrasound procedures averaged 5.2 per delivery, up 92% from 2004, according to an analysis of data compiled for The Wall Street Journal by FAIR Health Inc., a nonprofit aggregator of insurance claims. Some women report getting scans at every doctor visit during pregnancy.
The way I see it, the benefit of cheaper diagnostic technology is the difference between no access (or extremely limited) to that technology and access to an inferior but otherwise capable technology.
I agree to a certain extent. I think it would mostly be useful in developing areas where you might have someone who has training to make simple diagnostic calls (should this person be put on a 2 day bus ride to a hospital), but doesn't have the tools to make the diagnosis.
Basically, places where buying $10k of diagnostic tools wouldn't be tenable, either because of the price, or because they would get stolen or damaged before they could "pay off".
Places where I think this might be useful are places like Nepal, Sudan, Pakistan, India, Niger, Mongolia, etc. Places that have low development and population densities.
I think a DIY instrument would be especially useful in India, given the fact that it has low development levels but a lot of highly educated individuals and a strong central government.
That being said, this is all speculation. I don't know enough about ANY of those areas to say whether people there would actually find tools like this useful. I'm definitely not suggesting we start filling shipping containers with cheap instruments and shipping them abroad.
Imagine that your solution is a fraction of a percentage point worse than current treatment. Imagine there's 0.1% increase in harm.
The English NHS sees 1m patients every 36 hours. In 2012 - 2013 there were 9 million ultrasounds.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sit...
0.1% of 9million is 9,000.
I wouldn't want to tell those 9,000 people that their treatment was, even though they got harmed, good enough.
And that 9,000 is just in England.
If you want to save money on ultrasound spending you probably want to reduce the numbers of ultrasounds being taken. Healthy pregnant women with no problems only need one ultrasound, but in some places they're offered very many more.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/pregnant-women-get-more-ultrasou...
> In 2014, usage in the U.S. of the most common fetal-ultrasound procedures averaged 5.2 per delivery, up 92% from 2004, according to an analysis of data compiled for The Wall Street Journal by FAIR Health Inc., a nonprofit aggregator of insurance claims. Some women report getting scans at every doctor visit during pregnancy.