To determine whether patients are less likely to receive an inappropriate procedure in countries that devote fewer resources to health care than does the United States, we studied how appropriately coronary angiography and coronary artery bypass surgery were performed in the Trent region of the United Kingdom. The medical records of 320 patients who underwent coronary angiography and 319 who underwent coronary artery bypass surgery in 1987 and 1988 were randomly selected for review. Despite the United Kingdom's more limited use of coronary angiography and coronary artery bypass surgery, a substantial proportion were still performed for less than appropriate reasons, by both U.S. and U.K. criteria. Merely reducing the rate of use of these procedures will not be sufficient to eliminate such inappropriate use.

In most of the cost-utility literature, quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) gains are interpreted as a measure of social value. Given this interpretation, the validity of different multi-attribute health-state scaling instruments may be tested by comparing the values they provide on the 0–1 QALY scale with directly elicited preferences for person trade-offs between different treatments (equivalence of numbers of different patients treated). Norwegian and Australian public preferences as measured by the person trade-off suggest that the EuroQol Instrument assigns excessively low values to health states. This seems to be even more true of the McMaster Health Classification System. The Quality of Well-being Scale appears to compress states toward the middle of the 0–1 scale. By contrast, the Rosser/Kind index fits reasonably well with directly measured person trade-off data.

Promulgation of practice guidelines in medicine has increased interest in the structure of clinical policy making. It is argued that with a generic efinition of policy as “the rules governing the behavior of individuals or institutions,” clinical policy making is analogous to legislative policy making. Practice guidelines emphasize the advantages of making clinical policy more explicit. The structure of legislative policy making as evolved over many years to meet the challenge of making both the policies and the process of policy making explicit. Processes to promulgate clinical policies may be able to exploit this experience to improve clinical policy making and thereby retain control of the process within medicine. Generic steps are outlined for making decisions with incomplete information; synthesis of facts, vested interests, and values; involvement of stakeholders; and implementation of policy. An illustration of the use of the generic steps to make and implement a clinical policy for cesarean birth follows, with evaluations of its impact on the behavior and satisfaction of clinical stakeholders.

Many factors, including cultural, economic, technical, and regulatory influences, affect how different technologies come together for today's medical diagnostic products. An analysis of the development of automated immunoassay systems reveals that companies used a variety of approaches to access needed technologies, that mature technologies play an important role in the development of new products, and that implementation seemed more important in these companies than strategy.

The practice of medicine is intrinsically a cooperative activity, involving not only a number of individuals but requiring access to a wide variety of types of data, produced and maintained by different people. Achieving seamless, integrated access to these data requires a new infrastructure of information systems that supports the construction of applications designed to incorporate and use external information resources. The term groupware may be used to connote this collective set of information resources and tools for access to them. Groupware will generate a variety of new kinds of products and services with implications for medical libraries, electronic publishing, and academic and professional collaboration.

Non-A non-B hepatitis is the most common serious sequela of blood transfusion, and its screening has become an essential goal of blood transfusion centers. Before 1989, two surrogate screening tests (for alanine aminotransferase and for antibody to hepatitis B core antigen) were used; in 1989, a direct test for the antibody to hepatitis C virus (the main agent of this hepatitis) was developed. The French National Agency for the Development of Medical Evaluation undertook an investigation to determine the optimal prevention strategy for posttransfusion non-A and non-B hepatitis (PTH). A detailed literature review was performed, complemented by expert group opinion. The performance of each test was derived indirectly by calculating the number of cases of PTH averted by each test. Hepatitis C virus testing is probably the most promising strategy, but different policies can be developed given the uncertainties of scientific data. Cost considerations should be taken into account in identifying the best screening strategy.

Recombinant human erythropoietin is an efficacious therapy in treatment of the anemia of end-stage renal failure. However, the scale of impact on quality of life and medical care resources remains uncertain. By reviewing the literature we evaluate cost-effectiveness of recombinant human erythropoietin and show how previous studies may have implicitly overestimated cost-effectiveness.

Each group involved in the development of a new medical technology constantly assesses the value of the emergent technique in terms of the group’s own specific goals and conventions. The history of infrared thermography demonstrates the social nature of this assessment process.

Fueled by high returns on its investments, the pharmaceutical industry in the United States has flourished for the past 50 years. The regulatory strategy of demanding stringent testing then allowing market-based pricing has allowed private companies to fund ambitious research and development activities with the assurance that these investments will be recovered. However, aggressive managed-care cost-containment strategies threaten the companies' ability to recoup research and development expenses and may affect their willingness to invest in future innovative research.

There has been an exponential growth in the literature on economic evaluation in health care. As the range and quality of analytical work has improved, economic studies are becoming more influential with health care decision makers. The development of standards for economic evaluation methods would help maintain the scientific quality of studies, facilitate the comparison of economic evaluation results for different health care interventions, and assist in the interpretation of results from setting to setting. However, standardization might unnecessarily stifle methodological developments. This paper reviews the arguments for and against standardization, assesses attempts to date, outlines the main areas of agreement and disagreement on methods for economic evaluation, and makes recommendations for further work.

Little is known about the consumption of medical and surgical services by the most informed consumer in the health care market: the physician-patient. Such knowledge should be important for the understanding of the role of information on consumption, supplier-induced demand, the doctor-patient relationship, unnecessary medical services, and the adequacy of professional practices to the real health needs of the “ordinary patient.” We measured by questionnaire the standardized consumption of seven common surgical procedures. Except for appendectomy, the age- and sex-standardized consumption for each of the common surgical procedures was always significantly higher in the general population than for the “gold standard” of physician-patients. The data suggest that (a) contrary to prior research, doctors have much lower rates of surgery than does the general population; and (b) in a fee-for-services health care market without financial barriers to medical care, less-informed patients are greater consumers of common surgical procedures.

Health information systems are complex combinations of methods of organization and computer technologies. They are idiosyncratic to each country. Chad’s design of a national information system followed a process that can serve as a model for sustainable technology transfer—using consensual decision making and reinforcing administrative reforms while providing strong Ministry leadership and using technical assistance.

On the basis of two case histories of medical device innovation, two aspects of demand are identified: (a) the prospect of new markets and (b) information about user needs. Conditions for direct interaction between the user and producer in the innovation process are identified. The article concludes with some normative implications for the publicly designed generation of new medical technology.

The utility weights that are used in published scientific articles for assessing benefits in terms of quality adjusted life-years gained often have a weak theoretical and empirical basis. To a large extent, the weights seem to be used without critical thought and sensible discussion. In a majority of cases, the sensitivity of the results to the weights that have been chosen is not demonstrated, and readers are not provided with information in a way that facilitates independent calculations. This paper calls for a standard for future publications.

The authors present their experiences in assisting the government of Niger to develop automated information systems for health care management. They discuss the structure of the health system, the role of donor assistance, the process of initiating automated systems, and the technical requirements and costs of the system. Finally, they draw general conclusions that may be useful for those attempting similar efforts.

The development of new medicines requires a lot of time and the efforts of many researchers. One of the most taxing parts of this endeavor is the need for long-term toxicity studies in different animals. This paper describes the development of two different medicines: zimeldine, an antidepressant, and omeprazole, a compound that acts against a specific enzyme in the gastric mucosa that is necessary for the production of gastric acid. Zimeldine was launched in the international market but had to be withdrawn when it caused severe unexpected adverse reactions. Omeprazole has been marketed successfully after a prolonged development phase characterized by difficult problems with the toxicity studies. Against the background of these two descriptions, this article questions the rationale for the present rules for long-term toxicity studies and emphasizes the need for leaders in the pharmaceutical industry to have a solid scientific background in order to be able to decide whether to abandon a project.

In order to explore the diffusion of the selected technologies in one Canadian province (British Columbia), two administrative data sets were analyzed. The data included over 40 million payment records for each fiscal year on medical services provided to British Columbia residents (2,968,769 in 1988) and information on physical facilities, services, and personnel from 138 hospitals in the province. Three specific time periods were examined in each data set, starting with 1979–80 and ending with the most current data available at the time. The detailed retrospective analysis of laboratory and imaging technologies provides historical data in three areas of interest: (a) patterns of diffusion and volume of utilization, (b) institutional profile, and (c) provider profile. The framework for the analysis focused, where possible, on the examination of determinants of diffusion that may be amenable to policy influence.

Hospital reviews based on an adaptation of Gertman and Restuccia's Appropriateness Evaluation Protocol were performed by acute care hospitals and the canton of Vaud (Switzerland) public health department in three settings during a six-month period in 1990–1991. Interrater agreement between hospital and public health department reviewers was measured on 1,847 days of consecutively admitted patients during the last weeks of the reviews.