Medical technology and cost containment: two applications of operations research.
The government proposes "common sense" regulations to help contain rising health costs due to the increasing use of high-technology procedures, such as computerized tomography scanning. Two illustrations are given showing that such ad hoc regulations may have the effect of increasing costs and are certainly far from the optimum obtained by known methods of operations research.
D003201:Computers; D003363:Cost Control / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D003365:Costs and Cost Analysis; D006285:Health Planning / Q000191:economics*; D006301:Health Services Needs and Demand / Q000191:economics*; D006761:Hospitals / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D013677:Medical Laboratory Science / Q000191:economics* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009874:Operations Research; D014600:Utilization Review