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Recon takes an analytical look behind select developments in healthcare
An opinionated take on NEJM highlights for April 2018
Are we nearing an asymptote with implantable cardiac pumps? Severe heart failure is common, and spare hearts for transplant are rare, which has led to the development of implantable mechanical alternatives. In the last few decades, progress has been immense, and in the latest installment of a 3rd (4th?) generation pump, outcomes have reached a level where survival of several years is the rule. Still, at every iteration incremental improvement is less, and performance remains well behind what happens with transplant in terms of complications such as infection, stroke, or
Disease as an information defect
One way to think about disease[1] is as a loss of information[2] from the operating blueprint for human physiology. Broadly speaking, there are three main possible types of informational defects depending on the nature of the informational encoding that is compromised. The first is genetic through loss of information due to corruption of the genetic (and sometime epigenetic) code, for instance in congenital disease or in cancer. The second is spatial through loss of architectural information due to cumulative changes away from a structural template. This prevents turnover of tissue
Consider this speculative scenario on WMT-HUM: nibbling at the bottom and taking a slice off the top of the healthcare delivery pyramid
WMT is in talks with HUM about a relationship enhancement, possibly an acquisition. The two already know how to work together in alliances (narrow pharmacy network, marketing collaborations, points programs). If a new structure is needed, WMT and HUM must be considering a major expansion of scope or a set of operating models where contributions are difficult to attribute and reward (e.g. joint asset builds). What is on their minds? Beyond any interim incremental moves, what could be the endgame? Catching convergence fever Horizontal combinations among the top five health
United’s Medicare Advantage footprint and OptumCare network do not overlap much (so far)
United’s OptumCare promises a lot of value for health plans. An integrated system supported by Optum technology should be able to deliver consistent, analytically sophisticated care. Its ambulatory-focused configuration (clinics plus urgent care plus ambulatory surgical centers or ASCs) should keep patients out of high-cost settings through mutually reinforcing referral loops (where it has density[1]). One obvious question is whether United can use OptumCare to materially advantage its own health plans. Is a new, nationally-scaled Kaiser in the offing? If that is its endgame, United has a lot of work
EHRs + Genomics = Drugs? – An opinionated take on NEJM highlights for March 2018
GWAS, Regeneron and Geisinger, and liver disease Genome wide association studies (GWAS) look at broad populations for gene variants associated with a particular phenotype. Often, like in Type II diabetes, one finds hundreds of genes correlated with disease, and that’s obviously not very helpful. In lucky cases there are only a few variants, and that gives clues on potential underlying mechanisms of disease. But for the very lucky, there is a jackpot which is finding a variant that is actually protective against the disease – this is what happened with
Google’s health insurance apprenticeship: some unicorns (maybe) but no masterpieces
Last month, word got out that Verily is in talks with health plans to “jointly bid” on care management contracts. Medicaid populations might be a reasonable surmised as the target given that (1) managed Medicaid requires bidding, (2) Medicaid contracts typically come in packets of hundreds of thousands of lives (which was the scale mentioned in the press reports) and (3) Verily had been considering (but decided against) bidding on Medicaid contracts using Oscar Health as a partner. It is curious, however, to see an organization seek collaboration with health
What precisely lies behind UPMC’s $2B investment in three new specialty hospitals?
Last December, UPMC announced plans to spend $2B on three new specialty hospitals in downtown Pittsburgh. Each will abut an existing UPMC hospital currently serving as system center of excellence for the particular specialty: cancer will be located near Shadyside; cardiac and transplant near Presbyterian; eye and rehab near Mercy. Given inpatient’s declining share in care delivery, any new hospital construction in an over-bedded market with slow-moving demographics is a curiosity. Even if, as UPMC has promised, no net new beds will be added to the market, the new hospitals
Amazon offering health insurance: a potential mistake
35%+ of consumers who purchased on Amazon over a 30-day period say they would be “open” to health insurance created by Amazon according to a new survey (see Becker’s headline and the LendEdu study description). Not surprisingly, interest varied depending on degree of commitment the consumer had to Amazon: 62% of the sample were Amazon Prime customers, and, of them, 42% were open to the idea. That implies that 26% of non-Prime customers were open. This data point is a fine example of the kind of freebie thinking Amazon can
An opinionated take on NEJM highlights for February 2018
A-fib in heart failure – time to be aggressive Over the last 15 years, there has been a growing body of evidence for the effectiveness of catheter ablation to treat atrial fibrillation (a-fib), a condition for which the standard of care has been anti-arrhythmic medications. A-fib commonly coexists with heart failure but until now it has not been clear whether medication or catheter ablation would be the preferred treatment – we now have the answer, at least for patients with a substantially reduced ejection fraction. In a randomized trial of
Consider this speculative Amazon scenario in your strategic planning
Amazon has many puzzled about its plans for healthcare. Arguably, Amazon is just as puzzled, but is – in effect — running a massive Delphi process to sort out the plan. Amazon is, after all, the Breaker of Industries, Destroyer of Margins. Allow rumors to float, hire some people, have meetings, seek a few regulatory approvals, start a vaguely missioned non-profit with other business titans. Fear and greed do the rest. Stock prices gyrate as investors bet and counter bet on who is vulnerable, incumbent CEOs promise cooperation or competitive
Will the coming wave of gene therapies have a Sovaldi-like impact?
The first approval of a gene therapy for congenital disease in the US (Luxturna) inaugurates a new – though long anticipated – era for therapeutics. Along with questions around durability of response and long-term safety, pricing and reimbursement is a particular challenge. At $850,000, the price of Luxturna is nominally higher than other high-cost specialty medicines. However, as a one-time cost with a multi-year benefit, the cost per year of efficacy is far lower. This is not a new challenge for the industry: Hepatitis C antiviral therapies such as Sovaldi
How can Optum be in only 35 out of 75 target markets while also being available to 70%+ of the US population? An analytical speculation
During the UnitedHealth quarterly earnings call earlier this month, Larry Renfro, CEO of Optum, offered some additional color on the growth of OptumCare: “Combined with [Davita], OptumCare will be in 35 local care delivery markets, nearly one-half of the 75 markets targeted for engagement or development. And these market operations are still in the early stages of growth and development” (per transcript on SeekingAlpha). Yet, based on our data, we think OptumCare (including Davita Medical Group and its MedExpress and Surgical Care Affiliates components) is already present in Hospital Referral
Two steps forward, one step back: an opinionated take on NEJM highlights for January 2018
Playing chess against cancer Tumors are not intelligent, but, because they have escaped mutational control, they constantly probe for mutations that will allow them to escape chemotherapeutic suppression. The epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) is a frequent driver of malignancy in the lung and as such, a target for EGFR inhibitors such as erlotinib (Tarceva, Roche) or gefitinib (Iressa, Astra Zeneca); unfortunately, tumors initially responsive to these agents quickly develop mutations which make them resistant. Osimertinib (Tagrisso, Astra Zeneca) was designed to overcome the most common resistance mutations and has
The UPMC/Highmark brawl spills into Philadelphia’s backyard – what happens next?
(For background on Pennsylvania market, please take a look at previous note here) Summary The UPMC/Highmark rivalry continues to open new fronts in Pennsylvania Highmark’s response to UPMC is differentiated in two ways: first, Highmark is using a coalition building strategy and, second, it is controlling its exposure to big in-patient assets; in contrast, UPMC is building an integrated, single-brand system and happily taking over hospitals (and building more) along the way When UPMC and Highmark make major investments in a region, local systems will be caught in the capex
Ochsner signs LOI to enter northern Louisiana and secure a medical school affiliation
(For Louisiana market context, please take a look at previous notes on Ochsner here and here) Before the holidays, Ochsner signed an LOI to take over the management of ailing University Health located in Shreveport and Monroe and affiliated with LSU Health Sciences Shreveport. The details have yet to be finalized and public disclosure of discussions do not necessarily mean a deal will be made. But Ochsner has been looking at the system for a while and must know its warts and the state appears to have precluded other partnership
A golden age for gene therapy: an opinionated take on NEJM highlights for December 2017
Successes in gene therapy for hemophilia B and A Hemophilia A and B are X-linked genetic diseases which prevents the formation of functional coagulant factors VII and IX respectively and cause a propensity to bleeding in about 20,000 people in just the US. The standard of care of intravenous administration of recombinant factors is effective but also burdensome, expensive, and does not fully prevent the disabling sequellae of the disease caused by repeated bleeding in the joints. A possible cure is to deliver a functional copy of the defective gene
With the DaVita Medical Group acquisition, OptumHealth deepens its presence in existing markets rather than adding new ones
OptumHealth and its proposed acquisition target DaVita Medical Group (DMG) have a lot in common: Ambulatory care portfolios: physician practices, urgent care centers and ambulatory surgical centers (ASCs) – both directly owned and affiliated via owned independent practice associations (IPAs) Geographic position: multiple states and markets Advantaged model: within-market cross-referrals and care collaboration which should support market share, economics and a value-based care advantage Construction: largely assembled via acquisition resulting in similar challenges in integrating operations (e.g. multiple EHRs, management structures) In short, the DMG acquisition is a classic horizontal
United’s ambulatory delivery system OptumCare can reach 70% of the US population
Who will be the first to take integrated health care delivery national? A few years ago, the best bet might have been an established provider with a nationally compelling brand and a growing affiliate federation such as Cleveland Clinic or Mayo. Instead, Optum – just a decade ago three separate services largely focused on serving United’s health benefits business – has entered care delivery and — by a constant stream of acquisitions big and small — built up beachheads in a majority of markets and is – via ongoing big
Gene therapy, headaches, and tattoos: an opinionated take on NEJM highlights for November 2017
Two new therapies against a horrible congenital disease – but trouble ahead on pricing… Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) is a genetic disease that declares itself at a few months of age, and typically leads to death before the second birthday. Two studies for two different therapies are reported in the Journal. First, the final results for a phase 3 placebo-controlled trial studying nusinersen (Spinraza, Sarepta, approved by FDA Dec 2016) therapy which involves monthly injections into the infant’s spine of an RNA-based drug. These show a clear beneficial effect over
Allegheny Health Network adds micro-hospitals to its ground game
UPMC’s recent spectacular deal-making careen through central Pennsylvania (picking up the big Susquehanna and Pinnacle systems as affiliates and Tower as a joint venture partner all in under a year) contrasts oddly with its tentativeness at home: in mid-September, UPMC unexpectedly scuttled plans to build a 90-bed, $211M hospital in the South Fayette suburb of Pittsburgh just a week after signing a deal with a developer which would have launched construction. Spokespeople said UPMC is “pursuing other, more significant strategic options” (per Pittsburgh TribLive). Perhaps UPMC caught early wind of
Between the very common and the very rare – An opinionated take on NEJM highlights for October 2017
Between the very common and the very rare – An opinionated take on NEJM highlights for October 2017 Another tool for prevention in cardiovascular disease Taking aspirin daily has been standard of care for cardiovascular disease for decades, but attempts to demonstrate the additive usefulness of other agents to prevent clot formation have not been successful. Now things have changed: in a large study of patients with established cardiovascular disease, those who took rivaroxaban (Xarelto, Bayer) daily on top of aspirin did markedly better than with aspirin alone, although
Marrying into the right family pays off! Update on revenue cycle management joint venturing
Back in 2013, Dignity and Optum formed a joint venture for revenue cycle management (RCM) services named Optum360. Dignity contributed processing centers and 1,700 employees in return for ~25% share in the venture. Optum contributed technology and 1,300 employees in return for owning the rest. In addition, Dignity promised to buy RCM services from the joint venture for the subsequent ten years. At the time, our view was that the joint venture “marriage” gave Optum the scale and reference client needed to credibly compete vs. majors (R1, Parallon, Conifer) at
An opinionated take on NEJM highlights for September 2017
A new drug to address hard-to-treat severe asthma In ~10% of people with asthma, traditional therapies do not work well and they have recurrent exacerbations leading them to the ED. Over the past few years, a number of biologics (mAbs) have been developed to treat such patients, but each of these agents is targeted to a small subgroup with specific biomarker characteristics for which it has been shown to be effective, resulting in ultra-niche therapies with limited uptake. For broader penetration of those modalities, what is needed is a drug
Price, costs, value, and rules: An opinionated take on NEJM highlights for August 2017
At last, drug prices influence physician usage patterns Association of Reference Pricing with Drug Selection and Spending (subscriber access); Nitroprusside and Isoproterenol Use after Major Price Increases (free access) Not that long ago, the share of mind US physicians devoted to the cost of the drugs they prescribe was essentially zilch. Thankfully, times have changed as demonstrated in two interesting papers that describe natural experiments. The first compared trends in prescribing patterns at a payer that instituted reference pricing in 2013 vs. one that did not (reference pricing means that
An opinionated take on NEJM highlights for July 2017
Taking stock: two decades of progress in heart failure: Here comes a clever study using existing clinical trial data to assess progress in standard of care over time for heart failure. For each trial, the authors assessed the rate of sudden cardiac death during the early part of the study (excluding patients with ICDs), and it appears that between 1995 and 2014, it decreased by nearly half. As always, in observational retrospective studies, one has to worry about systematic biases around the population that are included (i.e. are they really
UPMC’s race to the sea and the tentative steps towards Highmark-Geisinger alliance
On May 10, Highmark and Geisinger announced plans for a clinical joint venture to create community-based care in four rural north-central Pennsylvania counties. The target counties are small (200K lives total), largely peripheral to Geisinger and Highmark core markets, and are already served by the Susquehanna Health system. Why all this complexity and investment to launch a battle for 1.5% of Pennsylvania’s population? Look at the whole board The move should be understood in the context of the widening struggle between Highmark and UPMC. Consent decrees have temporarily fixed some
June was negative-to-ambiguous: an opinionated take on NEJM highlights for June 2017
Stent news First there was angioplasty, then bare stents, then drug-eluting stents, and now the next generation: bioresorbable stents: each generation commanding a significant price premium for the manufacturers (but only for a few years). But, while bare stents and drug eluting stents were clear improvements on the previous standard of care, the case is not at all obvious for bioresorbable stents. Now the latest news is that the Absorb stent (Abbott), instead of showing a benefit over the previous standard of care, appears to lead to a higher rate
An opinionated take on NEJM highlights for May 2017
A hammer finds new nails (which happen to be eyeballs) The insulin growth factor receptor 1 (IGF-1R) was once upon a time a popular cancer target pursued by multiple biopharmas each with their own humanized antibody, and each without much success. In 2013, River Vision licensed the Roche compound teprotumumab, to treat Graves’ ophthalmopathy, a condition in which hyperactivity of the thyroid gland causes (among many other issues) bulging eyeballs with esthetic, comfort, and sometimes severe visual implications for which treatment options are limited. Nobody quite knows why the ocular
April was a light month: an opinionated take on NEJM highlights for April 2017
Calendaring care The length of our sidereal year is an accident – we happen to be circling a G2 star from which the habitable zone where free surface liquid water can exist lies at around 150,000,000 km; by Newton’s laws this in turn corresponds to an orbital period that is our year. Even if it is not particularly strongly connected to the underlying human biology, a lot of healthcare cycles are aligned to the Earth Year for convenience but is it effective and efficient? Individuals with diabetes are at risk
Urgent care gets drawn into system-level market share battles in the Big Apple
Warburg Pincus, the new majority owners of CityMD, a 68 site urgent care chain, will need to bring plenty of capital to an urgent care industry approaching its endgame. CityMD competes on a national stage against the likes of TPG’s Access Clinical Partners and UnitedHealth’s MedExpress. And rapid shifts in individual markets are raising the strategic stakes: where once urgent care could remain independent, today it is increasingly being asked to take sides in the share battles among big delivery systems. In November 2016, for example, Banner completed its acquisition
A population health approach to value-based drug pricing
Working Paper Summary Drug companies are naturally incentivized to price their drugs under assumptions of optimal clinical value, i.e. as high as possible. Payers react to this by setting stringent conditions for patient eligibility for coverage of those therapies. As a consequence, patients who do not meet these conditions do not receive those drugs even though they could derive benefit, albeit not of a magnitude that would justify the cost. Here we lay out a population health based scheme by which payers and drug companies can design a system
Regeneration and mitigation: an opinionated take on NEJM highlights for March 2017
Gene therapy for sickle cell disease Typical diseases targeted by gene therapy are those for which there is a defect that prevents the production of a functional protein needed for normal life; remediation is achieved by inserting functioning copies of the gene, and fortunately, it is usually the case that expression at a low level is sufficient to greatly improve outcomes. The situation is different in sickle cell where the defective hemoglobin is actually harmful, and where success of gene therapy requires not only production normal hemoglobin, but replacement of
It’s in the blood: an opinionated take on NEJM highlights for February 2017
A knock at the door of a monster franchise Adalimumab (Humira, Abbvie) is the best-selling drug on the planet with the bulk of sales coming from patients suffering from rheumatoid arthritis (RA). It is therefore quite a coup for Lilly/Incyte to have shown in a double blind controlled study that baricitinib, an inhibitor of JAK (an important intracellular signaling molecule), performed better in relieving the symptoms of patients with RA than adalimumab. It was all the more surprising given that another JAK inhibitor, tofacitinib (Xeljanz, Pfizer, now also approved for
Keeping the pipes clean and the wires intact: an opinionated take on NEJM highlights for January 2017
An innovative modality to suppress PCSK9 Antisense technology relies on the concept that it is possible to interfere with the cellular genetic machinery in very specific ways by deploying short RNA sequences that are complementary to the message that one wants to suppress. The idea has been around for a while, but has only achieved limited success in very niche indications (see here for the two latest). This is what makes the publication of phase 1 trial of the antisense agent inclisiran (Alnylam and the Medicines Company) targeting the synthesis
Is Anthem drawing a line in the sand on drug pricing?
The public debate on drug pricing has sharpened markedly over the past year. We are seeing more political scrutiny and media coverage, including the blowback on Mylan’s EpiPen pricing, tweets from now President Trump, as well as an unsuccessful California ballot initiative to force lower drug prices. This is all on top of a backdrop of seemingly ever-increasing coverage of the high costs of new medicines and double-digit price increases. Now market forces may be gearing up: in the past four months, Anthem — one of the “Big 3” payers
A strong close to a banner year for progress against cancer: an opinionated take on NEJM highlights for December 2016
Successful use of CAR-T therapy in a solid tumor Chimeric Antigen Reception T-cells (CAR-T) are immune cells molecularly engineered to seek out and destroy cancer cells; the push to develop them into a scalable generally usable treatment is likely the most exciting challenge in cancer right now. Successful CAR-T use has so far been generally confined to hematological tumors. In a brief report, a group from City of Hope reports on the use of CAR-T in a patient who was dying from an advanced, aggressive form of brain cancer, which
We may figure out cancer before we figure out the healthcare system: an opinionated take on NEJM highlights for November 2016
“My name is T-Cell…, James T-Cell” Immune T-cells are licensed to kill other cells through a quick molecular kiss of death, and as such are potentially powerful allies in controlling a tumor. For obvious reasons this killing power is under strict regulatory control and in particular T-cells display PD-1 proteins on their surface, which when engaged by the ligand PD-L1 on another cell, protects that cell from being killed. Tumors often display high levels of PD-L1 so that disrupting the interaction between PD-L1 and PD-1 can enhance the effectiveness of
An ad page in the NEJM and the future of cancer care
I am not sure how many docs continue to do this, but I still read the actual hard copy of my NEJM, and that means I flip past ad pages with smiling grandfathers playing with grandchildren thanks to supercalifragilistic products on my way to scholarly papers with tables and figures. But this time, I stopped in puzzlement when I came across exhibit 1; Intermountain is a health system based in Utah, very highly respected for its sound approach to quality and cost control[1], but not broadly well known for cancer care
An opinionated take on NEJM highlights for October 2016
Continued progress in multiple myeloma About 25,000 patients are diagnosed with multiple myeloma yearly in the US. Despite being initially treatable, typically this disease is ultimately lethal. Following a highly successful phase 1-2 study a monoclonal antibody against a marker of myeloma cells (daratumumab, Janssen) underwent phase 3 studies in combinations with established mainstays of therapy (the proteasome inhibitor bortezomib and the immune modulator lenalinomide) in a patient population several years out from their initial diagnosis. Results were stellar, with the inclusion of daratumumab decreasing the disease progression rate by
An opinionated take on NEJM highlights for September 2016
Taking a page from HIV to build a response to opioid abuse A couple of perspectives on the challenges of treating individuals who suffer from opioid dependence. The first highlights the importance of integrating medication assisted treatment (e.g. methadone or buprenorphine) into hospital and post-hospital care – plausibly an ED visit or a hospital stay for an event triggered by opioid abuse (such as an overdose) is a significant opportunity to go beyond treating the acute issue and starting patients on long term treatments. In the second, the author recalls
An opinionated take on NEJM highlights for August 2016: cleanliness is not next to healthiness, testing before thinking, a long slog for precision medicine
There is such a thing as too much hygiene The prevalence of asthma in children has increased dramatically over the last few decades. Observational studies have shown that children in “dirty” environments such as farms seem to be relatively protected from asthma. A theory is that the lack of exposure to microbes leads to higher sensitivity to allergens, but this causality has been hard to show. Amish and Hutterite farm communities are genetically similar, but Amish rely on animals instead of machinery, and Amish children have much lower incidence of
Rapid cycling to get medications right: a potential use case for coupling wireless patient monitoring with remote support?
Summary Cheap home devices are starting to generate a flood of high frequency, low latency biometric data, much of it of uncertain clinical value This uncertainty makes designing the service model difficult: high value use cases may get bundled with broader, low value, more speculative ones (e.g. behavior change), reducing overall ROI and uptake Given the patient-generated nature of the data and uncertain accuracy / calibration of the devices, use cases will need specific targeting or depend on subsequent clinical grade investigation to sort signal from noise High value use
NEJM Highlights for July 2016: Bayesians vs. frequentists, PCPs vs. specialists, SGLT-2 vs. GFR
Adaptive clinical trials slowly coming of age In an adaptive clinical trial, the protocol of the trial is allowed to change in a pre-specified manner during the study based on on-going study events. In this issue of the NEJM, two research papers, one perspective, and one editorial are devoted to the I-SPY 2 trials which dynamically changed randomization procedures for neo-adjuvant (pre-surgery) chemotherapy for stage II and III breast cancer and allowed accelerated identification of subgroups that benefit from a novel tyrosine kinase inhibitor (neratinib – Puma Biotechnology) and a
NEJM Highlights for June 2016: Improving care delivery is just plain #%^*! hard
Disappointing interim results from two ACA experiments Two papers reporting results from ACA experiments – the Comprehensive Primary Care (CPC) Initiative in which primary practices were incentivized with fairly generous payments to strengthen care management activities such as management of chronic conditions, or coordination of care – and the ACO initiatives (2012 cohort) described elsewhere in many reviews. Both papers provide a view on the early impact of these initiatives (2 years out) on costs and outcomes by using well controlled no-intervention comparison groups. The upshot is that so far,
Attacking an oligopoly by integrating downstream services: Can Livongo’s closed loop get traction vs. the big glucometer incumbents?
Summary Livongo is marrying a cellular-enabled glucometer and a data cloud with patient engagement services to help manage sugar levels Glucometer incumbents could match Livongo’s technology but will struggle to counter the business model innovation By expanding into services, however, Livongo is expanding its potential competitive set to include incumbent downstream care providers If Livongo’s model demonstrates compelling value, both device and services incumbents could find ways to stitch together competing solutions in collaborative ecosystems Closed loops are great ways to develop value propositions but can be rickety for trying
The many ways in which decreasing volatility in individual health care utilization is valuable
It is a long-standing hypothesis shared by many providers that community-based interventions that improve primary care could lead to overall healthcare savings by preventing (or delaying) the occurrence of medically expensive conditions. Rigorously proving this has been difficult, and only a few appropriately controlled studies have been published. In a Letter to the Editor of the American Journal of Managed Care[1], my colleague Alex Brown and I commented on an earlier article[2] evaluating the impact of a community health worker (CHW) intervention on healthcare costs. The study showed no significant
NEJM Highlights for May 2016: Referral for surgery, and a miscellany of interesting biochemistry
Surgical volume and referral for surgery: The impact of surgical volume on outcomes has been well documented, but is it top of mind with physicians referring patients to surgery? Readers of the Journal were polled on a hypothetical scenario whereby a community physician would be referring a patient in need of a major surgical procedure to either a nearby community hospital with a well-respected general surgeon doing approximately 5 of these cases a year versus a tertiary medical center 40 miles away. The great majority of readers chose the option
The future of cancer care: A bird’s-eye view
The recent World Medical Innovation Forum on Cancer convened by Partners Healthcare in Boston was attended by leaders in oncology from around the world including top: clinicians, bench scientists, policy leaders, and executives from hospitals and life-science companies. Two plus days of intense discussion and sharing of perspectives ably curated by Partners Innovation head Chris Coburn covered a range of topics from technology developments, to the healthcare system, and the patient/ doctor perspectives. The mind-map below is an attempt to organize the key themes that I heard through the conference and to try to convey why I came away
When is a patient not a patient? More often than you think
I have been conducting an informal test for the past year and a half. And while it has not been a full statistically-significant clinical trial with test and control groups, and “double blind” testing methods, the results have been striking… The way this test works is that when I meet someone new or reconnect with someone I have not seen in a long time, I ask them to describe themselves and then listen carefully to the answer. Some clear patterns emerge: It’s most common for people, and particularly my American
NEJM Highlights April 2016: Value and values: RBRVS, ACA and readmissions, E-cigs
RBRVS: an acronym we ought to think more about RBRVS stands for the Resource Based Relative Value Scale, and codifies the time and effort involved for a comprehensive set of physician activities on which Medicare payments are based. In this perspective, the authors highlight that most value-based payment (VBP) systems currently under development are essentially built as modifiers on top of the RBRVS. But the RBRVS has two major issues with it: it is “downward sticky” and has not evolved to take into account increased efficiency (e.g. automation), and it