Full Body Scans

The NY Times: Rapid Rise and Fall for Body-Scanning Clinics. This should have been obvious from the start, when they started out everyone was warning that it was not a very good diagnostic tool. I don't know how much these machines cost, but 25 patients a week, at $500 on the low end for a scan, that is more than $600,000 a year, I can see how they would run into trouble depending on what sort of staffing they needed. If a bunch of these places go out of business, maybe you could pick up one of these machines on the cheap and manage to turn a profit. I don't know, maybe these machines are not available to buy, only to lease on the manufacturer's terms, in which case it would be impossible to pick one of these up at a discount.

News

I originally envisioned this blog commenting on news about medical devices as I ran across it. There is a problem though, in that medical devices don't usually make the news. You might find some stent news or huge product recalls from time to time, but unless you specifically seek out medical device news, you do not find much.

I did a google search for medical devices and it turned out surprising relevant, the first one:

http://www.devicelink.com/

Anyone working in the field, or looking into working in the field, should be familiar with this and MD&DI as they are the trade show everyone must go to and look around or present. I ended up not going to MD&M West this year because I wasn't too thrilled about the schedule I'd have to keep to make it and our company is on a saving money kick and someone else from the company was already going.

The third link:

http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/

embarrassingly enough, I think this is only about the third time I've looked at the FDA web pages. The other times was looking up 510ks of other products.

Inspired

I've been inspired by blogs like http://medpundit.blogspot.com/ and http://www.corante.com/pipeline/ to start blogging. I'll try to stick to mostly the medical device field and see how that goes, yeah, news is limited and generally obscure, but I want to be a specialized, not all over the place. We'll see how it goes.