Vaccines can be delivered through the skin using ultrasound. This method doesn’t damage the skin and eliminates the need for painful needles. To create a needle-free vaccine, Darcy Dunn-Lawless at the University of Oxford and his colleagues mixed vaccine molecules with tiny, cup-shaped proteins. They then applied liquid mixture to the skin of mice and exposed it to ultrasound – like that used for sonograms – for about a minute and a half.
Sweet, now they can charge me $1k for a shot and not use a needle.
Last time I got an ultrasound the hospital charged me $2k. Wanted to confirm nothing was wrong with my kidneys. Turns out I was all good, but now I have an expensive bill to deal with…
$2k is largely the doctors time for the procedure, plus interpretation (sometimes another doctor entirely, particularly when multiple opinions are warranted).
Of course, the equipment probably isn’t cheap either
Edit - damn. Looks like I was very wrong on this one!
90-95% of imaging cost is the technical fee. An ultrasound is usually 0.5 to 1.0 RVUs roughly. So let’s say 1. The RVU rate for radiologists right now is around $45-60 an RVU. So of the $2k for the ultrasound, a Radiologist will make about $50 of it.
In my recent experience, that wasn’t the case. Ultrasound at the ER was $370 for the contracted radiologist. And a whipping $1700 for a 5 minute use of the machine.