Autism
Insurance Companies Resist Taking Advantage of Cheaper iPhone Medical Technology, Paying Thousands More
As medical technology improves, common sense dictates it will become more innovative and sometimes even cheaper. Medical applications on a portable device are not new, remember the old school Palm PDA? It was a must have for physicians and medical students. Just the other day I saw an attending pull out one of those old bricks. Other than the platform, the biggest difference between those Palm medical apps and the iPhone medical apps are the developers. The barrier of entry into making an iPhone medical app is significantly less than it was back in the day. Anyone can make an iPhone medical app (learn some programming, or pay someone) and submit it to the App store. This has both positives and negatives, as documented on this site.
Anyways, before I digress further, this influx of new developers has lead to innovation, and significantly cheaper applications. In order to embrace these applications, insurers are going to have to change their archaic ways, and at the end of the day, it’ll help out their bottom line. So, that leads us to the title of this post, why are Medicare and other insurance companies refusing to pay $150 for text-to-speech software, yet willing to pay $8,000 for a device that does pretty much the same?
