I’ve been working behind the scenes with a very talented group led by Dave Gershon, an over-qualified MD/JD who’s spent time on Wall Street. Dave has putting together an organization called The National Institute for Pharmaco-Economics & Healthcare Policy. The goal of the Institute is to start asking and answering the really hard questions that have been hitherto mostly avoided.

• What pharmaceutical and medical technologies and processes work best in the real world?
• What costly new technologies are justified in terms of savings elsewhere in the system and improvements in health and the economy?
• How can the right therapies at the right time be made available to those who need them?

To answer these questions is to provide a guide to some of the most important questions that will be facing us as we create the health care system for the next ten to thirty years. In my view, saying that we can do everything is not realistic, but saying that we can’t do anything is equally untrue. Anyone reading THCB (or the newspaper) has seen far too many articles about unnecessary care variation, marketing-driven prescribing, and unevenly applied medical technologies.

We can do better and we can do it with integrity. And we can advise decision makers in the public and private sectors how to cooperate on doing the right thing, while maintaining innovation.

That’s the underlying concept of this new Institute, and I encourage you to go take a look at the web site, at http://www.healthcare-economics.org and give me your feedback.