HOW STEVE JOBS SINGLE-HANDEDLY FIXED THE US HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

[defrog]

By request of bluesgirly , a post about telephones.

ITEM: The New York Times  tells the one about Kara Lynn, a woman whose mouth and throat muscles have been atrophied by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), thus removing her ability to speak, and who replaced her $8,000 Medicare-funded text-to-speech PC with a a $300 iPhone 3G running $150 text-to-speech software.

The punchline: Medicare won't cover the cost. Neither will private insurance companies. Why? Because the iPhone is not an outrageously expensive single-purpose $8,000 medical device.

Are you getting all of this?

And you wonder why healthcare is so expensive.

Insurance shenanigans aside, as a professional telephones journalist, I’m more interested in the idea that this woman replaced an $8,000 piece of highly specialized equipment (which is designed to do one thing, but do it very well, which is why it costs so much) and replace it with $450 worth of commercial off-the-shelf  (COTS) equipment.

It’s worth mentioning that while specialized speech-enabling devices are a little behind the times in terms of mobility, they are starting to catch up. For instance, DynaVox (which specializes in speech tech) recently unveiled an upcoming speech-enabling device the size of the GPS unit in yr car with a touchscreen, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth connectivity and 8GB of flash memory. It also sports a contact list, MP3/video players and a Web browser (though the latter is optional, otherwise, insurance companies won't cover it). On the other hand, they haven't released pricing info yet, but it’s likely to cost the equivalent of at least three or four iPhones.

What really makes this interesting (to tech nerds like me) is this:

Consumer-grade mobile devices are playing a growing role in the healthcare sector, from doctors and nurses using smartphones and netbooks for work purposes to remote patient monitoring where yr phone tracks your heart rate and blood pressure and emails or texts it back to the doctor’s office or direct to his BlackBerry. In the near future, Bluetooth-enabled body-area networks will take that concept even further.

Then there was the biomedical engineer at Cornell U who built a pocket-sized ultrasound device with $150 in spare parts. Apple will probably have a f***ing app for that by the end of next year.

We’re headed into interesting territory here: state-of-the-art biomedical equipment companies competing with the same company that thought up iPods. Not that mobile phones will replace dialysys machines or brain surgery tools or anything. And of course there will be tradeoffs in performance and security, among other things. (You can’t lose a lab-sized MRI machine in the back of a taxi.)

But as mobile devices get more sophisticated and cheaper  (and as the mobile-tech-savvy generation known as yr children get older) it’s hard not to wonder if at some point insurance providers will run out of reasons to not cover them – and if that happens, how that may affect pricing of specialty gear.

(And yes, I know, some people will try and scam the system to get a free iPhone or whatever. What else is new? People try to scam insurance companies all the time. What goes around comes around, Jim.)

Going mobile,

This is dF

Comments

[ziyda.livejournal.com]

Thanks a million, or $7550, anyway, for this post.
It is a huge shame to block cool stuff.

[wookiemonster.livejournal.com]

Nicely put, nicely written. Thankies! :)

[bluesgirly.livejournal.com]

I am just freaking out. I lost my mother to ALS. I am familiar with this technology. Well done. Anything that will help folks with ALS and make this crap cheaper - I'm all for it. ALS is the worst shit ever.

So is the government. Yep, worst shit ever. Go Medicare!

[def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com]

Boy, I can really pick 'em, can't I?

Sorry to hear about yr mom. A good friend of mine's mom had ALS too, so I've got a little familiarity with what ALS sufferers go through.