Tuesday, July 28, 2009  The Cost of Innovation  Matthew Yglesias
today writes about the effect that innovation in the medical
industry has on health care costs. There is a driving force in
the United States to push the envelope. New drugs. New
diagnostic modalities. New procedural techniques. And with the
latest innovation comes a heftier price tag. At some point, the
benefit of ground breaking technologies is outweighed by their
prohibitive costs.  In surgery specifically we are seeing this
with regards to minimally invasive surgery. Robotic surgery
programs are cropping up in academic centers across the country.
NOTES (natural orifice transendoscopic surgery, i.e.
"incisionless" surgery) has captured the attention of some
surgeons and just recently, the Natural Orifice Surgery
Consortium for Assessment and Research (NOSCAR) announced that
the first multicenter human trial on incisionless gallbladder
surgery has been approved. These developments, although
exciting, are not cheap to implement (especially the