Tag: primary care

Recon takes an analytical look behind select developments in healthcare

Walmart Health didn’t test the opportunity in rural underserved markets

What lessons can be drawn from Walmart’s precipitous shut down of its attempt to launch primary care, dental and behavioral health services?  The Walmart Health management team (after some mid-stream ‘dialing in’) was composed of savvy healthcare insiders; the team could tap into learnings from Walmart’s four prior attempts to launch clinics inside supercenters; and Walmart invested quite a bit of money in the effort. Collectively, however, these assets were not enough for success. We think Walmart Health’s key mistake was to target markets with high disposable income, which, unfortunately

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What’s so special about One Medical in the eyes of Amazon? A few quick thoughts

There isn’t a bricks-and-mortar primary care acquisition out there that is beyond Amazon’s financial reach.  While the announcement regarding One Medical has provoked fresh rounds of speculation about what Amazon might do broadly in primary care (e.g., push Pillpack),[1] our interest here is in why Amazon seems to think One Medical specifically is the right move right now.  Below are some quick thoughts:  Compatible business models One Medical’s legacy commercial business and Amazon (Prime) both operate a fixed annual membership fee plus charge-per-transaction business model.  The membership fee provides customers

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Iora Agonistes: High-touch primary care in Medicare Advantage is no sure bet after all

Iora Health was one of the original primary care transformers offering a clinically capable, engagement-focused, and accountability-grounded care model.  After an initial foray into commercial, Iora pivoted in 2014 to Medicare Advantage (MA), an alliance with HUM and a global capitation-oriented strategy broadly similar to Oak Street or ChenMed. MA – whose members often have chronic conditions that respond to management and with a payment model that rewards quality (via stars) and patient intimacy (via risk coding) – is fertile ground for Iora’s high touch primary care.  And that terrain

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NEJM Highlights October 2015: what to do, how to do it, and to whom

What are annual physicals for? Annual physicals are costly (~$10 billion annually) and have never been shown to improve outcomes, but people value them. In this dichotomy lies a lot of the inner tensions of medical care: between delivery of technical care, and nurturing of human relationships, and those are illuminated by two articles in counterpoint.  In the end though both sides come to a point of view that is not altogether dissimilar – that what is needed is not an annual physical, but some sort of preventive care/health review

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NEJM Highlights July 2015: a first in class drug for cancer, Sovaldi cures renal failure too (sometimes), convenient primary care

Palbociclib – first to target cyclin dependent kinases – breast cancer As all biology majors know, cyclin dependent kinases are critical elements controlling the machinery of cell proliferation.  They have proved difficult targets due to their ubiquitous activity in both normal and abnormal tissue – until now. In a phase 3 study, about 500 patients with metastatic hormone positive, Her2 negative breast cancer were treated with palbociclib (Ibrance, Pfizer, recently FDA approved) vs. placebo.  The median disease progression time for patients on drug was 5 months longer than for placebo

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