Help on the Way Against Obesity?
Reuters reports on the efforts of medical equipment manufacturers to help treat obese patients. Medtronic is experimenting with an implantable gastric stimulator (IGS) though it didn’t prove effective during its first clinical trial. The device, whose design is not unlike a pacemaker’s, came with the Transneuronix acquisition last year. Other settings such as different voltage will be tested in the future. The company is also considering deep brain stimulation as an alternative technology if IGS doesn’t deliver.
Start-up Enteromedics is working on blocking vagal nerve transmission to offer a programmable, low-invasive treatment to morbid obesity. An initial trial on 15 patients tried to assess whether slowing digestion this way would prove effective, and more trials are on the way. Still, right now increasingly popular bariatric surgery (typically with gastric bands or bypasses) is the only treatment proved to work to some extent.
Meanwhile Materials Management looks at the impact of obesity on hospitals, a topic Hospital Buyer covered back in January. Group purchasing organization Novation surveyed its member hospitals for the third year in February 2006 and found that 64 percent kept seeing increasing admissions of obese patients. This leads to higher expenses by as high as a factor of two for reinforced products such as wheelchairs or toilets, not to speak of nurse training costs.
Thankfully for hospitals, Medicare and insurance companies now have easier reimbursment policies for specialized equipment. Moreover, bariatric surgery was reported to be profitable for 59 percent of the facilities surveyed by Novation. Hospitals have to ponder the creation of a specific bariatrics department or the addition of bariatric rooms in their various sections based on geographic data, the availability of similar services in nearby healthcare centers, as well as organizational concerns to improve outcomes.
April 27, 2006 Related topics: Bariatrics & Obesity