Cochlear implants
This article was originally published in The Gray Sheet
Executive Summary
Pediatric cochlear implantation accrues net expected savings of $53,198 over a child's lifetime, Andre Cheng, MD/PhD, Johns Hopkins University, et al., concludes in an Aug. 16 Journal of the American Medical Association article describing the first cost-utility study of profoundly deaf pediatric patients and their parents using U.S. cost data. Scores from three quality of life measures, based on a scale from 0 to 1, demonstrate improvement over pre-implantation status: health utility index (39%, n=22); visual analog scale (27%, n=78) and time trade-off (22%, n=40). Cochlear Corp.' s Nucleus-24 and Advanced Bionics' Clarion implants were used in the study