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Investment State-of-Play in Big Pharma: Bayer’s Eugene Borukhovich Weighs In

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By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Bayer’s G4A team launched their 2019 program today, so here’s a little help for anyone curious about the state of pharma startup investment and what it takes to land a deal there these days.

I had the chance to pick the brain of Bayer’s Global Head of Digital Health, Eugene Borukhovich, during JP Morgan Healthcare Week and pulled out these three gloriously thought-provoking soundbites from our conversation to give you some insight as to the mindset over at big Bayer.

  • “Digital therapeutics are shining light on the convoluted, complex mess of digital health”

If you’ve wondered what lies ‘beyond the pill’ for Big Pharma, wonder no more. It seems the answer is digital therapeutics. Eugene predicts that “within the next couple of years, ‘digital health’ as a term will disappear,” and calls out organizations like the Digital Therapeutics Alliance for their efforts to set standards around evidence-base and behavior modification so regulators and strategic investors alike can properly evaluate claims made by health tech startups. As time goes on, it looks like efforts to ‘pharma-lize’ the ways startups take their solutions to market will increase, pushing them into more traditional go-to-market pathways that have familiar and comforting guidelines in place. As Eugene says, “Ultimately, what we say in my team, is that it’s about health in a digital world today.” Sounds like that’s true for both the products he’s seeking AND the way pharma is looking to bring them to market… 

  • “These multi-hundred million [dollar] press releases are great to a certain extent, but what happened to the start-up style mentality?”

When asked about Big Tech getting into Big Health, in the end, it seems, Eugene shakes out to be in favor of the ‘Little Guy’ – or, at least, in their approach. Don’t miss his comments about “cockiness in our healthcare industry” and how Big Tech is working around that by partnering up, but the salient point for startups is that big companies still seem very much interested in buddying with smaller businesses. It’s for all the same reasons as before: agility, the ability to iterate quickly, and the opportunity to do so within reasonable budgets. Eugene offered this telling rhetorical musing: “Just because it’s a combination of two big giants…do you need to do $500 million? Or, do you give some…traction, milestone, [etc.]…to prove it, just like a start-up would?”

  • “In large organizations, transformation equals time, and…we don’t have time.”

“To me,” says Eugene, “the biggest challenge is actually landing these inside the organization.” He’s talking about novel health solutions – digital therapeutics or otherwise – after learning from previous G4A cycles. Culture, precedent, and years of market success loom large in big healthcare companies across the ecosystem, which is one reason why innovation inside them is so challenging. Eugene says he’s “a big believer in a small team – even in large organizations – to take something by the cojones, and get shit done, and move it forward, and push the envelope from the bureaucracy and the process.” There’s a sense of urgency to ‘innovate or die’ in the face of the growing competition in the healthcare industry. “Back to this earlier conversation around whether it’s tech giants or other companies,” he adds, “it is a race to the speed of the organization. How quickly we learn and how quickly we make the decisions. Bottom line, that’s it.”

There’s plenty more great insights and trend predictions where these came from, plus the juicy details behind how G4A itself has pivoted this year. Check out the full interview now.

Radiology in India

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By SAURABH JHA, MD

What are the challenges of bringing advanced imaging services to India? What motivates an entrepreneur to start build an MRI service? How does the entrepreneur go about building the service? In this episode, I discuss radiology in India with Dr. Harsh Mahajan, Dr. Vidur Mahajan and Dr. Vasantha Venugopal. Dr. Harsh Mahajan is the founder of Mahajan Imaging, a leading radiology practice in New Delhi, and now a pioneer in radiology research in India.

Listen to our conversation on Radiology Firing Line Podcast here.

Saurabh Jha is an associate editor of THCB and host of Radiology Firing Line Podcast of the Journal of American College of Radiology, sponsored by Healthcare Administrative Partner.

Radiologist Entrepreneurs

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By SAURABH JHA MD

What motivates the radiologist entrepreneur? In this episode of Radiology Firing Line Podcast, we talk to Kathryn Pearson Peyton MD, chief medical officer of Mammosphere.

Listen to our conversation here.
 
Saurabh Jha is a contributing editor to THCB and host of Radiology Firing Line Podcast of the Journal of American College of Radiology, sponsored by Healthcare Administrative Partner.

The Business Case for Social Determinants of Health

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By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

How can understanding the underlying social risks impacting patient populations improve health outcomes AND save health plans some serious per-member-per-month costs? You’re probably familiar with the concept of ‘Social Determinants of Health’ (SDOH) but Dr. Trenor Williams and his team at health startup Socially Determined are building a business around it.

By looking at data around what Trenor calls ‘the Significant 7’ social determinants (social isolation, food insecurity, housing, transportation, health literacy, and crime & violence) he and his team are working to help health plans intervene with their most vulnerable populations and bring down costs.

What kind of data is Socially Determined looking at? Everything from publicly available data on housing prices and air quality, to commercial datasets on buying preferences and more. Plus, with help from their health plan partners, they’re using clinical and claims data to create a complete picture of health care spend, utilization, and outcomes.

Trenor walks through some very specific examples in this interview to help illustrate his point. In one, Socially Determined was able to identify how Medicaid could better help asthmatics manage their asthma AND save a thousand dollars per affected member each month. Another project in Ohio identified that a mother with a history of housing eviction was 40% more likely to give birth to a baby requiring NICU care – opening up myriad opportunities for early intervention and the potential to positively impact the lifetime health of both mother and child.

As healthcare continues to realize its ‘data play’ – and look beyond the typical data sets available to healthcare companies – the opportunities for real and meaningful impact are tremendous. Listen in to hear more about what Trenor sees as the new opportunity for Social Determinants of Health.

Filmed at AHIP’s Consumer Experience & Digital Health Forum in December 2018.

Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare by meeting the people who are going to change it. Find more WTF Health interviews here or check out www.wtf.health. 

Interoperability and Data Blocking | Part 1: Fostering Innovation

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By DAVE LEVIN MD 

The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) have published proposed final rules on interoperability and data blocking as part of implementing the 21st Century Cures act. In this series we will explore the ideas behind the rules, why they are necessary and the expected impact. Given that these are complex, controversial topics, and open to interpretation, we invite readers to respond with their own ideas, corrections, and opinions.

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Health IT 1.0, the basic digitalization of health care, succeeded in getting health care to stop using pens and start using keyboards. Now, Health IT 2.0 is emerging and will build on this foundation by providing better, more diverse applications. Health care is following the example set by the rest of the modern digital economy and starting to leverage existing monolithic applications like electronic health records (EHRs) to create platforms that support a robust application ecosystem. Think “App Store” for healthcare and you can see where we are headed.

This is why interoperability and data blocking are two of the biggest issues in health IT today. Interoperability – the ability of applications to connect to the health IT ecosystem, exchange data and collaborate – is a key driver of the pace and breadth of innovation. Free flowing, rich clinical data sets are essential to building powerful, user-friendly applications.  Making it easy to install or switch applications reduces the cost of deployment and fosters healthy competition. Conversely, when data exchange is restricted (data blocking) or integration is difficult, innovation is stifled.

Given the importance of health IT in enabling the larger transformation of our health system, the stakes could hardly be higher. Congress recognized this when it passed the 21st Century Cures Act in 2016. Title IV of the act contains specific provisions designed to “advance interoperability and support the access, exchange, and use of electronic health information; and address occurrences of information blocking”. In February 2019, ONC and CMS simultaneously published proposed rules to implement these provisions.

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THCB Spotlights: eyeforPharma

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By ZOYA KHAN

Jessica DaMassa interviews Paul Simms, the Chairman of eyeforpharma. Eyeforpharma are the “media moguls” when it comes to the Pharma industry. In order to innovate the industry, they are holding two different conferences this year to bring pharma leaders and health technology startups together to foster relationships and strategic partnerships with one another. Their first conference will be held in Barcelona in March, and the second one will be in Philadelphia in April.

Paul speaks to Jess about how health tech startups are maturing in their ways and realizing that health care is an institutionalized game, causing them to pivot their companies’ directions to fit that model. He also comments on how the pharmaceutical industry is trying to build strong relationships with particular startups to innovate their business practices, whether it be in R&D, drug discovery, or clinical research. Paul argues that the future of Pharma is more akin to a platform model, where pharma companies are not just limited to their internal capacity but are much more reliant on a larger ecosystem of moving parts that will help develop and grow the space. He also mentions that Pharma companies could really benefit from taking a page out of Google’s or Facebook’s business model which allows people to innovate and create their own content on these platforms. He further states that large B2C companies, like Amazon, will change the entire game of how people receive and curate their health insurance plans. 

eyeforphrama’s conference theme is “medicine is just the beginning”. Paul and his team believe if they bring together specific groups of people, it will benefit the pharmaceutical industry in the short term as well as the long term. Paul believes that “Pharma companies need to have a wider portfolio of innovation that goes far beyond medicine, whether that is drug+plus a solution or without the pill at all.”  Currently, Paul states, that the merging of pharma companies with other pharma companies is like having “s*x with your cousins” and believes that Pharma companies need to bridge out of their own space to keep up with the times. If you are a startup in this space, be sure to check out eyeforpharma’s upcoming conferences.

Zoya Khan is the Editor-in-Chief of The Health Care Blog and an Associate at SMACK.health

The Power & Perils of Unconventional Healthcare Partnerships

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By LYGEIA RICCIARDI 

Last week’s announcement by Aetna and Apple of their Attain “experience” designed to enable Aetna members to achieve better health using the Apple watch was the latest in a series of partnerships vying to shake up healthcare from an unconventional angle. Others include Amazon-Berkshire Hathaway-JP Morgan’s collaboration to reshape health insurance, and Uber and Lyft’s numerous partnerships with Sutter, CareMore Health, and other healthcare systems to address transportation challenges for patients.

The Heat is On

Big changes in healthcare—including the shift to value-based care, the growing influence of consumerism, and a recognition that health outcomes depend on a wide array of everyday life factors ranging from foods to moods—are forcing the old guard in healthcare to recalibrate. Healthcare provider organizations alone engaged in a record-breaking 115 mergers and acquisitions in 2017, and continued apace until now, with deals already announced in 2019 between Dignity Health and Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI), among others.   

The most interesting partnerships, from my perspective, pair traditional healthcare players with non-traditional ones: it’s a recognition that something fundamental has to change, a point which hasn’t been lost on the 84% of the Fortune 50 companies that are already in healthcare, up from 76% in 2013. Everyone from tech giants to car manufacturers seems to gambling to some extent on healthcare. And why not, when the potential jackpot just keeps growing?

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Has U.S. Health Care Spending Finally Stabilized? An Outlook for 2019

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By ETIENNE DEFFARGES 

The official 2017 statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) are out, and there are some good news: The annual growth rate of health care spending is slowing down, and is the lowest since 2013 at 3.9%—it was 4.3% for 2016 and 5.8% for 2015. The bad news is that our health care cost increases are still well above inflation, and that we spent $3.5 trillion in this area, or 17.9% of GDP. Americans spent $10,739 on health care in 2017, more than twice as much as of our direct economic competitors: This per capita health care spending was $4,700 in Japan; $5,700 in Germany; $4,900 in France; $4,200 in the U.K.; $4,800 in Canada; and an average of $5,300 for a dozen such wealthy countries, according to the Peterson -Kaiser health system tracker from the Kaiser Family Foundation, and OECD data. Spending almost a fifth of our GDP on health care, compared to 9-11% for other large developed economies (and much less in China), is like having a chain tied to our ankles when it comes to our economic competitiveness.

Could 2019 be the year when our health care spending actually decreases, or at least grows at a slower pace than inflation? Or will we see instead an uptick in costs for health care consumers?

To answer these questions, we need to look in more detail at the largest areas of health care spending in America, and at the recent but also longer term spending trends in these areas. Using the annual statistics from the DHHS, we can compare the growth in spending in half a dozen critical health care categories with the growth in total spending, and this for the last three years as well as the last decade. Over the last decade, since 2007, these costs grew 52% in aggregate (from $2.3T to $3.5T) and 41% per capita (from $7,630 to $10,740).

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Despite Youth On Farm, Abbott Ventures Chief Avoids Spreading Manure

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By MICHAEL MILLENSON 

Abbott Ventures chief Evan Norton may have spent part of his youth on a farm, but there’s no manure in his manner when speaking of the medical device and diagnostics market landscape. The key, he says, is to avoid being blindsided by the transformational power of digital data.

“We’ve been competing against Medtronic and J&J, so that has the risk of us being disintermediated by other players that come into the market,” Norton told attendees at MedCity Invest, a meeting focused on health care entrepreneurs. “Physicians are coming to us and asking for access to data for decisions, and they don’t care who the manufacturer [of the device] is. Are we enabling data creation?”

Abbott, said Norton, wrestles with whether they are simply data creators or want to get paid for providing algorithmic guidance on how the data is used. (Full disclosure: I own Abbott shares.) Other panelists agreed making sense of the digital data deluge remains the central business challenge.

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Creating an Infrastructure of Health Data to Support Amazon’s Leap into Healthcare

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Claudia Williams, Manifest MedEx, Amazon

By CLAUDIA WILLIAMS 

Amazon has transformed the way we read books, shop online, host websites, do cloud computing, and watch TV. Can they apply their successes in all these other areas to healthcare?

Just last week, Amazon announced Comprehend Medical, machine learning software that digitizes and processes medical records. “The process of developing clinical trials and connecting them with the right patients requires research teams to sift through and label mountains of unstructured clinical record data,” Fred Hutchinson CIO Matthew Trunnell is quoted saying in a MedCity News article. “Amazon Comprehend Medical will reduce this time burden from hours to seconds. This is a vital step toward getting researchers rapid access to the information they need when they need it so they can find actionable insights to advance life-saving therapies for patients.”

Deriving insights from data and making those available in a user-friendly way to patients and clinicians is just what we need from technology innovators. But these tools are useless without data. If an oncology patient is hospitalized, her provider may not be informed of her hospitalization for days or even weeks (or ever). And the situation is repeated for that same patient receiving care from cardiologists, endocrinologists, and other providers outside of her oncology clinic. When it comes to personalized health and medicine, both the quantity and quality of data matter. Providers need access to comprehensive patient health data so they can accurately and efficiently diagnose and treat patients and make use of technology that helps them identify “actionable insights.”

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