The newborn screening educational gap: what prenatal care providers do compared with what is expected.

Objective: The purpose of this evaluation was to examine prenatal care providers' knowledge of, attitudes towards, and barriers for providing information about newborn screening and tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) screening.

Study Design: We mailed a 12-question survey to 6197 prenatal care providers in California asking about their experiences with newborn and prenatal screening services.

Results: Although 4/5 of respondents believe newborn screening is very important for their patients, only 1/3 discuss it with all their patients.

Is there a kink in consumers' threshold value for cost-effectiveness in health care?

Background: A reproducible observation is that consumers' willingness-to-accept (WTA) monetary compensation to forgo a program is greater than their stated willingness-to-pay (WTP) for the same benefit. Several explanations exist, including the psychological principle that the utility of losses weighs heavier than gains. We sought to quantify the WTP-WTA disparity from published literature and explore implications for cost-effectiveness analysis accept-reject thresholds in the south-west quadrant of the cost-effectiveness plane (less effect, less cost).