Medical technologies are an important component of medical care and can provide significant positive benefits to patients. Medical technologies can advance the identification and treatment of disease, can provide for more comfortable treatment regimes and reduce pain, offer new treatment options for ill individuals where none previously existed, and can provide a safer environment for both patients and providers fortunate enough to have access to them. In many cases, medical technologies can accomplish these improvements cost effectively, and in some cases can reduce costs while improving outcomes. So how good is Canada’s health care system at ensuring that patients have high-tech health care available to them?
Advanced medical technologies can deliver numerous benefits to both patients and those funding the health care system. For example, newer advanced diagnostic equipment such as multi-slice Computed Tomograhpy (CT) scanners, more powerful Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machines, and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanners (both) stand-alone and combination PET/CT units) allow for greater accuracy, speed, and efficiency in diagnosing medical problems. They also provide less invasive procedures for the diagnosis of disease, which can facilitate earlier and more localized treatment. Doctors can use more sophisticated scanners to observe and learn more about the body’s functions and location of disease without subjecting the patient to surgery for either diagnosis or needless interventions. For example, a PET scan can detect a lung cancer that has spread, thus avoid a futile operation. It can also determine if liver tumours can be safely removed, and can help determine if chemotherapy treatment is working, or whether the drug cocktail being provided needs to be changed (Priest, 2006). PET scanners also allow some patients to avoid surgical biopsies for the diagnosis and identification of cancers.
New medical devices can also offer new treatment options to patients who were previously left untreated. Consider the Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD), which works on the same principal as an external defibrillator, but is implanted in a patient’s chest. The ICD sends an electrical current to the heart when it detects serious arrhythmia, or a stoppage, in order to restore normal rhythm. This device allows patients at risk of sudden cardiac arrest to live independently and not be under constant surveillance.
In countless way, medical technologies can improve access to care, improve effectiveness of care, decrease morbidity and mortality, speed up recovery, and increase patient comfort. These benefits are not just theoretical, but have been quantified in published studies.
A recent report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (2007) looked at trends in hospital use. It suggested that “advances in medical technology [are] leading to more efficient ways of treating inpatients” (p. 15). The report also found that more operations are being performed as outpatient day surgeries across Canada; the number of hospital procedures performed as outpatient day surgeries increased by 30.6 percent over 10 years, while the number of inpatient surgeries decreased by 16.5 percent. The total number of surgeries increased by 17.3 percent. Further, the age-standardized hospitalization rate decreased by 25 percent over the 10 years, falling from roughly 11 out of 100 Canadians being hospitalized in 1995-1996, to roughly 8 out of every 100 Canadians in 2005-2006. The total number of days Canadians spent in acute care hospitals had also decreased, falling from approximately 23 million days in 1995-1996 to 20 million in 2006 (a 13.1 percent reduction). Moreover, even though the average length of hospital stay remained unchanged since 1995-1996 at 7.2 days, the age-adjusted national average length of hospital stay decreased from 7.5 days in 1995-1996 to 7 days in 2005-2006 (a 6.7 percent decrease). The report made no explicit link between the reduced length of hospital stay, the reduced likelihood of hospitalization, the increased reliance on outpatient day surgery, and advances in medical technology. However, the correlation between advances in medical technology (pharmaceutical, surgical, diagnostic, and otherwise) and shorter hospital stays is worth noting and has been confirmed by studies examining some forms of medical technologies (see, for example, Lichtenberg, 2003).
