Lowering Medication Costs – Update

Peter ForsterCosts of Treatment, Website Update

The New York Times recently reviewed two websites that offered to substantially reduce the cost of psychiatric medications for those without adequate insurance coverage. We’ve updated the section of this website that provides links to information about lowering the costs of medications and that mentions the option of purchasing medications from Canada as well as information about these two sites. …

TMS Cost Effectiveness

Peter ForsterCosts of Treatment, Treatments of Depression

“Is TMS Cost-Effective?” His provocative title of an article just published in psychiatric times which summarizes an Australian pharmaco-economic study. In case you don’t want to read through the rest of this article, here is the summary: “Australian researchers compared the cost-effectiveness of rTMS with pharmacotherapy in treatment-resistant patients with MDD (ie, those who have failed at least 2 courses …

Fee Changes

Peter ForsterGPS Update

It is time to update our fee list. The last time we revised our fees was in November of 2013. In preparation for this task we reviewed data on health care costs in the Bay Area from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and we compared our fees to average fees in San Francisco for the same services (CPT codes) using …

Integrated Medical and Mental Health Care Works

Peter ForsterPhysical Conditions and Health, Policy

 Integrated medical and mental health care works. And this may be psychiatry’s moment to shine. That’s the suggestion made by an expert in the field of health management in a lecture that he gave at last week’s institute for Psychiatric Services Meeting in San Francisco. He cites increasing focus on managing people with chronic medical conditions and high cost — …

Depression Costs US 200 Billion Dollars Per Year

Peter ForsterCosts of Treatment, Treatments of Depression

A meta-analysis of more than 60 clinical studies covering almost 60,000 adult patients estimates that the total cost in the United States of the treatment of patients with depression is in the range of $188 billion to $200 billion. Roughly a third of all costs ($64 billion) are related to people with treatment-resistant depression, who represent only a fraction of all cases. The article, “A Review of the Clinical, Economic, …