The Relationship Between Health Policies, Medical Technology Trends and Outcomes

The goal of this paper is to present new comparative evidence on heart attack care in 17 countries showing that changes in medical treatments are universal, but have differed greatly. We have collected a large body of comparable information that show how countries differ in treatment rates and why these differences are relatively marked. Countries appear to differ systematically in the time at which intensive cardiac procedures began to be widely used and in the rate of growth of the procedures. Our results show that differences in treatment rates are greatest for expensive medical technologies. Also strict financing limits and regulatory policies have affected the adoption of intensive technologies. These differences may have important economic and health consequences.