US hospital boffins demo cancer-busting smartphone kit America's FTC might be chasing after snake-oilers offering “detect cancer” smartphone apps, but that doesn't mean your mobe can't play a genuine diagnostic role. Researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital reckon with a bit of cloudy goodness, custom-made add-on optics and the right reagent kit, smartphones can gather …
<cynic on>$1.80 per assay? So the doctor who takes the sample, takes his cut to pay for the smartphone and his overhead. Add $200. The lab will add on a tidy profit plus the cost of the IT equipment and personal... add another $200. The insurance company will be billed for 1.5 times that since they never pay full-price. $1.80 per assay you say? Yeah.. right. <cynic off>
On the less cynical side, this can be a good thing. Especially if the volume lets the price (to the consumer or insurance company) drop. Being "new", insurance companies will probably tag it as "experimental" and not cover any of it. But it becomes affordable even without the insurance company paying, it will be very beneficial for those who might go undiagnosed.
The fundamental problem with the for-profit model of medicine is that they have a vested interested in your being sick so they can profit. From the insurance side, they have no sincere interest in reducing costs because higher costs simply mean they can sell you more insurance to pay those higher costs.
By the way, I have experience with the pre-ObamaCare system, and it was outrageously expensive and I would have been bankrupted except for the detail that the other guy had enough insurance to pay for most of the damage he'd caused.
In contrast, my recent experience is with the Japanese healthcare system, which is quite a bit like the ACA (AKA ObamaCare). One major difference is that there are non-profit public insurance options that essentially keep the private insurance companies honest. A second major difference is that the government regulators are relatively competent and even respected and the bureaucrats are actually doing a pretty good job of keeping costs down. Two of the results are long lifespans and low medical costs.
Assay is what you do to test the purity of Gold.
I guess this will be another 'gold mine' for US doctors. The prices they charge are frankly obscene. If you don't have insurance or your insurance company says 'Sorry Dave, I can't allow that' then you are SOL.
for those of us there in Blighty, we just go meh!
I can't thank my Consultant enough for spotting my Leukaemia 6 years using nothing more than a traditional microscope. A tool like this might have been useful to him. I'll have to ask him when I go for my annual checkup in a couple of weeks.
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It's not difficult to imagine some version of big blue sorting through lots of samples but it will be a long time before legally a qualified human won't be examining anything flagged as suspicious with a few random samples from the normal pile thrown in for good measure. Biggest benefit this system will probably bring is allowing lower qualified techs being sent out to remote locations (or people's homes if they are house bound) and doing the test there with the images uploaded for analysis elsewhere.
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