Dr Steven Pearson Outlines Specialty Conditions Impacting Healthcare Spending

Steven D. Pearson, MD, president of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, discussed the specialty conditions that are having the biggest impact on overall healthcare expenditures and pharmaceutical spending.

Transcript (slightly modified)

Which specialty conditions do you think will have the biggest impact on healthcare expenditures?

As far as overall expenditures, I think cardiovascular disease, and a lot of other chronic conditions diabetes, congestive heart failure, COPD, those kinds of things tend to dominate a lot of the spending within health systems.

Now, if you’re looking at pharmaceutical spending, a lot of emphasis is always going towards oncology because that’s where, especially new drugs, are priced higher and higher, and there tend to be treatment models that extenuate the simultaneous use of multiple drugs, or the sequential use. And since cancer is now becoming more and more a chronic disease, which is fantastic for patients, it does tend to accumulate in growing expenditures on the health system side.