Following on from my last post on asthma, here are the economic details for the other two big respiratory disease expense categories: COPD and Pneumonia.
Disease economics: Asthma
Asthma and COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) show up as the the fifth most costly clinical category in US healthcare at $60+ Billion / yr. (see footnotes for source etc). As with prior posts in this series, I wanted to see if a deeper analysis of the economics suggested possible interesting business opportunities.
And I have recently seen several interesting healthtech startups attacking the asthma space and wanted to use these expense numbers to understand better the opportunity they are targeting.
Disease economics: Backpain
I was interested to see that Back problems are the ninth most costly clinical category in US healthcare at almost $40B / yr. I chose back pain as the second in my series on disease economics.
Most ($31B) of the costs falling into the back problem category come from a single clinical condition code #205 (Spondylosis; intervertebral disc disorders; other back problems).
And most of these expenditures go toward hospital in-patient visits/procedures ($11B), and Clinician office visits ($13B).
For the details, read on.