Study Claims Medtronic Builds a Better Cardiac Reset Device–Higher Price Tag

According to the study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the CRT-D is stated t out perform others on the market and reduces visits to the hospitals. Along with better technology too comes a higher price tag. It can be 5 to 15k more expensive than other pace makers.

Medtronic also plans to pursue FDA approval for less than severe heart failure issues in the future. The CRTD requires an additional wire to be implanted and thus so is a bit more complex in design than others. I’m sure we will see others with newer technologies evolving with pace makers to compete. When we look at cost and affordability no doubt this is going to be a tough one for decision makers for cost approval areas and just how much can the medical market sustain here? I don’t have the answer but it seems to keep going up.

When you look at some of the other sites that show the investor spin on this story on the web, you get statements like this: heart failure will cost the US about $40 billion in services and lost production”…what ever happened to wanting to save a life? Is that not what this is all about and not the concern over “lost production” from us poor little humans? I guess investors don’t think about the fact that real humans that are not in the stock market read this stuff and are capable of interpreting some of this, and perhaps sometimes they might remind themselves that they are mere humans too.

Boston Scientific received FDA approval to market their more complex CRT-D product a couple months ago. The defibrillator race is on it seems. BD

Medtronic Inc.’s device to synchronize the heart’s pumping action helped slow the physical decline of heart-failure patients in a study that may boost use of the therapy in patients in early stages of the disease.

Adding cardiac resynchronization, or CRT, to a defibrillator reduced by 25 percent the risk of death or hospitalization from mild-to-moderate heart failure, compared with use of a standard defibrillator, according to a study reported at the American Heart Association meeting in Chicago.

The device, costing about $35,000, is approved for use in people with severe heart failure. Minneapolis-based Medtronic, the world’s biggest maker of heart devices, plans to seek U.S. approval to expand use of its CRT-D devices in those with milder symptoms in the coming months, said Catherine Peloquin, a spokeswoman, in a Nov. 13 telephone interview.

In the Medtronic study of 1,798 patients, 33 percent of those with the device died or required hospitalization for heart failure, compared with 40.3 percent of those who received a regular defibrillator. About 21 percent of the group with the Medtronic device died during the study, compared with 26 percent of the defibrillator patients.