MRIs per Million People, by Country

#healthpolicies #management #government #health

The Canadian newspaper Globe & Mail recently published an OECD comparison of MRI machines per million people, showing Canada near the bottom. While this facilitates quick country-to-country comparisons, interpreting the data without context can be misleading. The real issue is not only the number of machines but how this relates to health care access and delivery in Canada.

To build on this point, while a better supply of MRIs sometimes correlates with shorter waits, correlation is not the same as the actual wait-time data. OECD and national health agencies publish wait-time statistics separately. Wait times = supply + demand + system factors With these considerations in mind, we conducted the research to determine whether MRI machine concentration was correlated with wait times. We found that concentration is not directly related to access and wait time, but in Canada, the worst concentration of MRIs per million people at 10.4, vs Belgium at 10.5, masks the fact that Canada is doing much worse than all of the OECD. Canada deviates the most, with 12+ weeks above the group median. The median stands at 6 weeks. This is roughly 3 times longer than the typical wait in this set of countries and stands out as a clear outlier.

• Given these findings, is the concentration of MRIs what drives health policy-making? Or wait time access?

• Is Canadian policy-making conducive to too decentralized access to medical devices?

• Why does the OECD lack standardized access time to MRIs?