A fictitious medical clinic that must decide whether it should test its patients for a certain disease or not is examined in terms of analysis costs involving pretesting versus the costs of waiting and recommendations on what the clinic should do are also offered.
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treatment measures. While Blodgets Disease is not a real disease (and the following treatments arent real, either), this is the kind of scenario that many medical clinics undergo when it
comes to the screening and treatment of various diseases. Before determining the actual screening processes and costs, its helpful to determine who
is at risk for Blodgets Disease. The high-risk group for this disease is men between the ages of 20 to 30, who suffer from knee and joint problems, as well
as certain types of stiffness and loss of mobility in these joints. Among men with these characteristics, 1 in 10 tested positive for Blodgets Disease.
The medium-risk group is men - and women - between the ages of 20 and 30, who dont have joint stiffness or mobility problems. One in 100
people tested in this group tested positive for the disease. The low-risk group - consisting of everyone else (i.e., men and women under the age of 20 and older than
50) - determined that approximately 2 in 10,000 had Blodgets Disease. The good news in terms of diagnosing this disease is that
a new, inexpensive test, called the Fox test, is now in circulation, and is available to help screen clinic patients. The test costs $100 and considered relatively reliable, with a
sensitivity and specificity of 95 percent. What this means is that for a person who has the disease, there is a 95 percent chance the test will correctly provide a
positive result, with a five percent chance for a false-negative result. Meanwhile, for the person who does not have the disease, the test will provide a negative result 95 percent