Electronics in medicine: The microprocessor takes over and the ultimate CAT scanner nears completion, but costs still soar

Last September a report from the United States Office of Technology Assessment called for new ways to evaluate the efficacy and safety of medical technologies, as well as their cost effectiveness and social impacts. Shortly thereafter Joseph Califano Jr., Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, told the annual meeting of the Institute of Medicine that his department was concerned about allegedly extravagant use of advanced medical technology. It was, in some respects, a year of seeming contradictions for medical electronics.