Date and Time
May 3, 2006
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

By influencing provider reimbursement and demand for services, growth in the use of managed care plans like HMOs may influence technology diffusion in health care. The paper to be discussed in this seminar empirically examines the relationship between HMO market share and the diffusion of cardiac care technologies over the 1980s and 1990s, focusing on cardiac catheterization, percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), and coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery.

Areas where HMO activity was stronger and grew faster had slower adoption of PTCA and CABG. The researchers also found, however, that these areas tended to have historically high rates of cardiac catheterization lab adoption and that these tended to persist even when adoption of CABG and PTCA were decreasing. Further evidence from data on patient treatment patterns and outcomes suggests that limiting the availability of CABG and PTCA services reduces the probability that a heart attack patient will receive potentially beneficial intensive treatments.