Medical Technologies Speech

Medical Technologies Speec

Socioeconomic Differences in the Adoption of New Medical Technologies

New medical technologies hold tremendous promise for improving population health, but they also raise concerns about exacerbating already large differences in health by socioeconomic status (SES). If effective treatments are more rapidly adopted by the better educated, SES health disparities may initially expand even though the health of those in all groups eventually improves. Hypertension provides a useful case study. It is an important risk factor for developing cardiovascular disease, the condition is relatively common, and there are large differences in rates of hypertension by education. This paper examines the short and long-term diffusion of two important classes of anti-hypertensives - ACE inhibitors and calcium channel blockers - over the last twenty-five years. Using three prominent medical surveys, we find no evidence that the diffusion of these drugs into medical practice favored one education group relative to another. The findings suggest that - at least for hypertension - SES differences in the adoption of new medical technologies are not an important reason for the SES health gradient.

EXOGEN ultrasound bone healing system for long bone fractures with non-union or delayed healing: a NICE medical technology guidance

Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.A routine part of the process for developing National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) medical technologies guidance is a submission of clinical and economic evidence by the technology manufacturer. The Birmingham and Brunel Consortium External Assessment Centre (EAC; a consortium of the University of Birmingham and Brunel University) independently appraised the submission on the EXOGEN bone healing system for long bone fractures with non-union or delayed healing. This article is an overview of the original evidence submitted, the EAC’s findings, and the final NICE guidance issued.The Birmingham and Brunel Consortium is funded by NICE to act as an External Assessment Centre for the Medical Technologies Evaluation Programme

How medical technologies materialize oppression

Biomedical practice can encode and perpetuate oppressive ideologies. This encoding and perpetuation, scholars like Liao and Carbonell (Citation2023) convincingly argue, can occur not only via social practices, but also through medical technologies themselves. In other words, medical technologies can “materialize oppression”: they can be biased in a way that systematically “reflects and perpetuates unjust power relations” (Liao and Carbonell Citation2023, 9).In this paper, I examine how medical technologies materialize oppression, offering a preliminary, non-exhaustive taxonomy of the mechanisms of this materialization. While scholars like Liao and Carbonell focus primarily on physical medical instruments, I offer new examples that illustrate these mechanisms at work, focusing on medical data classification technologies and infrastructures. A clearer view of how these mechanisms operate suggests possibilities for building technologies that liberate rather than oppress

Instrumental and Transformative Medical Technologies

This Article considers how medical technologies impact universality in health care. The universality principle, as embodied in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (A CA), eliminated widespread discriminatory practices and provided financial assistance to those otherwise unable to become insured a democratizing federal act that was intended to stabilize health care policy nationwide. This Article posits that medical technology, as with all of medicine, can be universalizing or exclusionary and that this status roughly correlates to its being instrumental technology or transformative technology. Instrumental technology acts as a tool of medicine and often serves an existing aspect of health care; in contrast, transformative technology is pioneering, meaning it creates a new form of care or otherwise is novel. Instrumental and transformative medical technologies provide end points on a continuum, which provides a lens through which to examine whether medical technology has greater potential to facilitate universality or exclusion. The Article first examines where technologies fit on the instrumental-transformative continuum and then considers measures more specific to universality, namely improving the quality of medical care, access to care, or the cost of care. These considerations help to pinpoint the moment at which a technology may have a universalizing effect, if at all. The Article concludes with preliminary thoughts regarding whether the instrumental-transformative continuum helps to determine whether certain technologies should be adopted or supported publically or allowed to develop (or fail) organically.

Welcome to Medical Technologies Journal

Welcome to Medical Technologies Journal MTJ. MTJ is an international peer-reviewed journal and an interdisciplinary one focusing on relevant innovations on medical technologies and findings relative to medicine. This editorial presents the global initiative of the journal in a nutshell. It is also dedicated to welcoming contributions to the journal and for introducing the first issue

Media education technologies in developing students' professional competence

While pervasive healthcare systems bear the potential to provide patients with a new quality of medical homecare, the complexity of such systems raises fundamental questions of behavior, communication and technology acceptance. This is especially important, as users of future healthcare systems will be increasingly characterized by diversity. Relying only on highly experienced and technology-prone user groups, which might have been typical users in the last decades, is not sufficient anymore. Rather, elderly users, users with a completely different upbringing and domain knowledge, and ill or handicapped people will have to use the systems. Today, the understanding, in which way physical, emotional and cognitive abilities, caused by individual learning histories and health states, may impact the usage and acceptance of pervasive healthcare technologies, is restricted. This research contributes to this topic by investigating the acceptance motives of aged users with different health states regarding three different implementation concepts for medical technologies: medical technology implemented in mobile devices, smart environments and smart clothing. Using the questionnaire method, a total of 82 users between 40 and 92 years of age were examined regarding their usage motives and barriers with respect to the different technology concepts. Overall, it was revealed that acceptance issues and users' needs and wants should be considered in order to successfully design new medical technologies

Transaction Prices and Managed Care Discounting for Selected Medical Technologies: A Bargaining Approach

It is generally assumed that managed care has been successful at capturing discounts from medical providers, but the implications have been a matter of debate. Critics argue that managed care organizations attain savings by reducing intensity of services, while others have argued that savings are 'real' and are a consequence of discounts per unit of care. To address this, we obtain separate transaction prices for hospital episodes (treatment) and for the narrowly defined surgical procedure, using the example of heart bypass surgery. Both sets of prices were drawn from a database of insurance claims of self-insured firms that offer a menu of insurance options. We use a Nash-Bargaining framework to obtain price discounts by type of insurance. Adjusting for product and patient heterogeneity, the per-procedure prices yield the anticipated pattern of discounts: Relative to traditional fee for service, point-of-service HMOs exhibited the largest discounts followed by Preferred-Provider-Organizations (18 and 12 percent, respectively). While reductions in intensity of services are not directly observable from the data, combining the results from the per-procedure and per-episode analysis yields a range of intensity reduction of 20-6 percent, with a corresponding per-unit price discount of 4-18 percent for the entire episode. We conclude that a large share cost savings by managed care organizations are due to per-unit price reductions.

Beauty and Health: Anthropological Perspectives

This essay, written as a 'teaser' for an up-coming symposium, reflects on how human beauty can be understood from an anthropological and medical anthropological perspective. First, it considers how aesthetic and healing rationales can conflict or merge in a variety of medical technologies and health practices. Second, it discusses beauty in relation to the socioeconomic transformations of modernity and globalization. It suggests the need for a theoretical framework that departs from a strictly constructivist approach and views beauty as a distinct domain of social experience, not reducible to an effect of other inequalities