First Impressions

When I was first told to come up with ten different ways that technology reduces health care costs, there were several ideas that immediately came to mind. The first of these is the correlation between improving both the efficiency and cost of creating drugs and vaccines and reducing the cost of health care. If medicines are more easily manufactured, the supply will go up and the price will go down. For example, drugs used for the treatment of cancer are often extremely expensive for a large variety of reasons. One of the primary reasons with this problematic pricing is that cancer drugs are often a necessity; if one has a rare form of leukemia, one simply must get the drugs, no matter the price. One branch of Bioengineering technology is the discovery and refinement of medicines, and this would clearly impact health care, as medicines are a large part of health insurance and people’s lives and it is rare to find a single individual who does not need use drugs at some point in their lives. Another similar method to reduce health care costs is to dedicate more research to diagnostic machines used by doctors. This task is well within the Bioengineering world and can reduce the expensive costs that patients incur from simply trying to be diagnosed. Examples of technologies that can be improved in both availability and efficiency as well as low-cost per usage include MRI machines, x-rays, ultrasounds, and EKGs. So that’s two out of ten, I’m sure the next eight will be more subtle ideas that won’t be so apparent.