Med device marketers – take note! If you aren’t already seeing the impact healthcare officials are taking to limit hospital spending, you will be shortly (and this goes way beyond the medical device tax). Recent reports have shown that healthcare spending has been significantly increasing over the last 10 years. And many healthcare officials believe that the current rate of growth is unsustainable. The average price of new cancer drugs alone has more than doubled within the last decade from about $4,500 to 2002 to around $10,000 today. While the prices of medical devices are in actuality rising at a much slower rate, medical device marketers are still threatened by a growing skepticism around what some perceive as excessive expenditures within the hospital setting.
As a result, leading healthcare centers have begun saying no to new drugs and treatments where the cost/benefit ratio seems off-balance. Recently, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center announced in October this year that they would not be providing a new cancer drug, Zaltrap, as a treatment option for their patients.
While studies demonstrated that Zaltrap prolonged patient lives by an average of 1.4 months compared to a standard chemotherapy regimen, the drug cost more than $35,000 during each month of treatment. Because of this, the physicians of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center argued that the slightly better benefits of the drug did not justify the associated cost.
