Tag: American College of Cardiology

A New Era in Value-Driven Pharmaceuticals

May 22, 2014• 3

By Leonard Kish & Cyndy Nayer

At the end of March the Amercian College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA) issued a joint statement saying they “will begin to include value assessments when developing guidelines and performance measures (for pharmaceuticals), in recognition of accelerating health care costs and the need for care to be of value to patients.”

You may have heard of value-based medicine, but are we entering a new era of value-based medications or value-driven pharma?

Price transparency is great, but it has be combined with efficacy to get to value (price for the amount of benefit). Medical groups are catching on to how important value assessments are, because if patients can’t afford their medication, they won’t take their medication, and that obviously can turn into poor outcomes.

Twenty-seven percent of American patients didn’t fill a prescription last year according to a Kaiser Family Foundation Survey. This trend seems likely to continue as we move toward higher-deductible plans, where those with insurance can have great difficulty affording medications.

Included in the ACC/AMA statement was a quote from Paul Heidenreich, MD, FACC, writing committee co-chair and vice-chair for Quality, Clinical Affairs and Analytics in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.

“There is growing recognition that a more explicit, transparent, and consistent evaluation of health care value is needed…These value assessments will provide a more complete examination of cardiovascular care, helping to generate the best possible outcomes within the context of finite resources.”

Spreading risk and payment to different members of the health care value chain is beginning to make it apparent to more people and organizations that resources are finite. Patients and their physicians are starting to ask which treatments are worth the cost and have best likelihood of adherence.

An outgrowth of the move toward digital health and accountable care is that we’re entering every patient into a potential personal clinical trial with their data followed as a longitudinal study, and we can look much more closely at efficacy and adherence and reasons why it happens and why it doesn’t.

It won’t be long before we start to see comparative effectiveness across a variety of treatments and across a variety of populations. When we can connect outcomes data, interventions and costs all in the same picture we begin to see where the value (price against results) is and where it isn’t.

How Clinical Guidelines Can Fail Both Doctors and Patients

Jan 30, 2014• 25

By Robert McNutt, MD & Nortin Hadler, MD

Any confusion over the recent news of cholesterol guidelines in the U.S. is perfectly understandable. On the one hand, the guidelines suggest that nearly half the population should use statins to stave off heart attacks and strokes. On the other, use of the drugs is not with potential side effects and, to many, will offer no substantive benefits. The controversy highlights a problem mired in an outdated way of thinking about health care and the doctor-patient relationship.

Guidelines came about after generations of physicians wanted to bring something more than “opinion and experience” to the patient’s bedside. In the late 1960s legislation for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was amended to call for a demonstration of efficacy and an assessment of benefits and risk as prerequisite to the licensing of any pharmaceutical. Modern clinical science resulted, first slowly and now with an avalanche of clinical trials, each pouring forth outcome data galore.

The Burden of Clinical Data

Clinicians are expected to stay current with this wealth of information. The modern medical curriculum instructs all budding physicians on how to evaluate the quality and the clinical relevance of all such contributions to the body of clinical science. Because some (or perhaps many) find this exercise overwhelming, there are organizations—many academic and some without any discernible relationships with purveyors that could pose a conflict of interest—that attempt to bundle the information in a fashion that might be relevant to particular physicians or physicians in particular specialties. Some of this bundling is quite systematic, some quite helter-skelter.

Occasionally there is a contribution to the literature that offers an unequivocal advantage for a particular patient group. More often, the bundlers are faced with a heterogeneous literature that often demonstrates little, if any, efficacy. Faced with these circumstances, biostatistics has offered up many a method to impute more value to the literature than is apparent at first blush. The result is that all this bundling adds to an enormous and ever-expanding secondary literature.

What is the clinician to do?

The Cholesterol Gulag

Nov 19, 2013• 14

By Vik Khanna, Tom Emerick & Al Lewis

Last week, we were amongst the very first opinion leaders to speak out against the new cholesterol guidelines from the American Heart Association (AHA) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC).

Our error was not going far enough.

Monday’s New York Times carried a devastating portrait of the development of the guidelines, leaving readers with the unmistakable impression that this absurd attempt to make people into patients was not just poor policy it was a hubristic, avoidable policy folly, sort of like the bridge to nowhere and federal housing policy pre-2008.

Trust is an interesting thing; once broken it almost resists reconstruction. Public trust in the AHA and ACC is crumbling as we write and deservedly so, as what should have been clear becomes more confusing and conflicted by the minute.

Instead of giving generally healthy middle aged American adults (like the three of us) the safe haven of a cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention framework that is understandable, sensible and actionable, we got a cholesterol gulag. Only here in the land of the free, it’s not a government gulag imprisoning the political opposition.

No, in a phenomenon unique to the US, it’s a health gulag intended to take people who need advice, support, and guidance and give them a pill, which is the first step in an intentional ensnarement in the medical care system. It’s the Hospital California…on steroids, and you can’t even checkout because that would be against this addled medical advice.

To clarify: we have zero objection to providing statins, especially low-cost generic ones, to people under age 75 with current CVD, diabetes, or extremely high cholesterol levels. The drugs may very well save their lives.

Our beef is with the cockamamie reduction in the ‘risk-to-treat’ threshold from 10% risk of heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years to 7.5% for people with none of the above noted problems.

The Statinization of America

Nov 14, 2013• 42

By Vik Khanna, Tom Emerick & Al Lewis

On November 12, 2013, the American Heart Association (AHA) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC) disrupted the cardiovascular disease (CVD) universe by issuing four new guidelines. The guidelines depart from past efforts because the relevant federal agency, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHBLI), did not lead development. NHBLI now ‘sponsors’ guideline development, but has deferred actual writing and publication to private groups.

No word on when long-awaited companion blood pressure guidelines will emerge. If the blood pressure guidelines look anything like these cholesterol guidelines, then all rational arguments about cost containment will effectively come unhinged.

The guideline release was well orchestrated, not unexpected in organizations so well-funded by the pharmaceutical companies. They are the population that stands to benefit the most from what Alan Cassels, author of Selling Sickness and Seeking Sickness, which both seemed to anticipate moves like this, calls “statinization.” Fortunately, not everyone was drinking the “treatment today, treatment tomorrow, treatment forever” Kool-Aid; contrarian physicians believe that the guidelines simply lowered the therapeutic bar without clear evidence that doing so will improve outcomes, an ironic observation given that this is supposed to be about primary prevention.

The contrivance of simply altering a definition and having the subsequent area under the curve of healthy people who require treatment expand to include, oh, say 30 million more Americans is a merger-and-acquisition coup for pharma that would make Gordon Gekko blush.

Lowering the therapeutic bar will increase health care spending as physicians write more prescriptions and see more patients more often, certainly to monitor liver health, and probably for the side effects that cause double digit percentages of patients to stop and are routinely underreported in studies sponsored by the industry.

It also gives patients false security by promoting the belief that the heartily recommended drugs – statins – will provide a “cure,” a clinical get-out-of-jail-free card, which will surely diminish enthusiasm for lifestyle-based approaches to prevention that are free but unfortunately not reimbursable. And, as Abramson and Redberg note in their New York Times essay, the enunciated strategy will require perpetual treatment of 140 people to forestall 1 heart attack. Many of these people will now live long enough to experience “disease substitution,” allowing them to die of cancer or dementia.

The most important element of the new guidelines, however, is the shift away from pursuit of hard targets (get total cholesterol below 240 and LDL below 180) to a risk-based approach (for people without clinically evident disease), in which the therapeutic goal is to medicate non-diseased adults aged 40 to 75 who have an estimated 10 year risk of developing heart disease greater than 7.5% (down from 10% risk over 10 years). Overall, this necessary and overdue shift properly emphasizes CVD risk as a constellation and exposes our cultural tendency to seek or initiate treatment because of a single adverse attribute, which has led us to waste a fortune chasing clinical ghosts.

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