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Who Will Solve Healthcare For Our Parents And Grandparents? Probably Not Google.

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By Leslie Kernisan, MD

I assume by now that you’ve heard the news: Google wants to tackle aging. Specifically, they announced this week the launch of Calico, “a new company that will focus on health and well-being, in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases.”

Because, says Larry Page, with some “moonshot thinking around healthcare and biotechnology, I believe we can improve millions of lives.”

“Can Google Solve DEATH?” shrieks a TIME cover.

Google’s goal, it seems is to find ways to extend human lifespan and essentially stave off aging.

Coincidentally, on the same day Physician’s First Watch directed me towards this NEJM editorial, announcing that NEJM and the Harvard Business Review are teaming up on a project on Leading Health Care Innovation.

Here is the paragraph that particularly caught my eye:

“The health care community and the business community today share a fundamental interest in finding ways to achieve higher value in health care. The ultimate objective for both communities is to keep people healthy, prevent the chronic illnesses that consume a large fraction of our health care dollars, use medical interventions appropriately and only when needed, and create an economically sustainable approach to the delivery of health care. While we want to foster innovation and novel therapies against disease, we also recognize that, whenever possible, prevention of disease before it is established is the better solution.” [Emphasis mine.]

And therein lies the rub. Whether it’s Google or a high-powered partnership between NEJM & HBR, everyone is enamored of prevention and innovative cures.

Let’s prevent those pesky chronic diseases! Let’s cure aging!

Ah, spare me.

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Science-Driven Innovation and Tech-Driven Innovation: A Marriage of Convenience or a Marriage Made in Heaven?

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By Tom Hubbard

NEHI recently convened a meeting on health care innovation policy at which the Harvard economist David Cutler noted that debate over innovation has shifted greatly in the last decade. Not that long-running debates about the FDA, regulatory approvals, and drug and medical device development have gone away: far from it.

But these concerns are now matched or overshadowed by demands for proven value, proven outcomes and, increasingly, the Triple Aim, health care’s analog to the “faster, better, cheaper” goal associated with Moore’s Law.

To paraphrase Cutler, the market is demanding that cost come out of the system, that patient outcomes be held harmless if not improved, and it is demanding innovation that will do all this at once.   Innovation in U.S. health care is no longer just about meeting unmet medical need. It is about improving productivity and efficiency as well.

In this new environment it‘s the science-driven innovators (the pharma, biotech, and medtech people) who seem like the old school players, despite their immersion in truly revolutionary fields such as genomic medicine. It’s the tech-driven innovators (the healthcare IT, predictive analytics, process redesign, practice transformation and mobile health people) who are the cool kids grabbing the attention and a good deal of the new money.

To make matters worse for pharma, biotech and medtech, long-held assumptions about our national commitment to science-driven innovation seem to be dissolving. There’s little hope for reversing significant cuts to the National Institutes of Health. User fee revenues painstakingly negotiated with the FDA just last year have only barely escaped sequestration this year. Bold initiatives like the Human Genome Project seem a distant memory; indeed, President Obama’s recently announced brain mapping project seems to barely register with the public and Congress.

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Healthcare Lands: Announcing the Journal of Delivery Science and Innovation

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By Ashish Jha, MD

There is an old saying that every unsustainable trend, by definition, comes to an end.  The U.S. healthcare system has been on an unsustainable trajectory, consuming more and more of our national income while failing to deliver the kind of care that Americans need and deserve.  But although every unsustainable trend eventually ends, how it ends is up to us.

The healthcare system has the potential to collapse under its own weight, requiring Americans to pay even more for healthcare, forcing draconian and blunt cuts in the kinds of services available, and putting high quality healthcare out of reach for the poor and the sick.

An alternative future is one in which payers pay for value, providers become more efficient and patient centered, and consumers become increasingly engaged in caring for themselves.  In this future, healthcare becomes an important force for improving the health of the American public.

What will determine which path our healthcare system will take?  While the fate of our healthcare system will be influenced by policymakers in Washington DC and the state capitals, it will ultimately be decided by each of us – providers and patients who are involved in the daily work of delivering and engaging in healthcare.

The journal Healthcare: The Journal of Delivery Science and Innovation is an effort to nudge us toward a better, sustainable path for our healthcare system.  The mission of the journal is simple:  to play a meaningful role in fostering real change in the healthcare delivery system.  The journal wants to be a venue for sharing the best ideas for delivery science, payment innovation and smart use of health information technologies.  The journal was conceived by Amol Navathe and Sachin Jain, who have been thinking long and hard about compelling new approaches to bring about change in the healthcare system.  It took years of persistence to line up a terrific publisher, put together a top notch editorial board and recruit some of the nation’s best minds to lead individual theme areas.  And it paid off handsomely.  Today, June 26th, Healthcare officially launches with its premier issue, and what an issue it is.

The two introductions are short, pithy and worth reading over and over again.  The first is by Don Berwick, the former Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services but even more importantly (at least to me), the man who has done more to promote quality and safety than anyone in recent memory.  Don frames the issues in ways that only he can, reminding us that we can have the best healthcare system in the world – we have all the pieces – but we have to learn how to put it together.

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Hospitals’ Twenty First Century Time Warp

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By Jeff Goldsmith

There has been a lot of controversy in health policy circles recently about hospital market consolidation and its effect on costs.  However, less noticed than the quickened pace of industry consolidation is a more puzzling and largely unremarked-upon development:  hospitals seem to have hit the wall in technological innovation.   One can wonder if the two phenomena are related somehow.

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, health policymakers warned constantly that medical technology was driving up costs inexorably, and that unless we could somehow harness technological change, we’d be forced to ration care.  The most prominent statement of this thesis was Henry Aaron and William Schwartz’s Painful Prescription (1984).  Advocates of technological change argued that higher prices for care were justified by substantial qualitative improvements in hospitals’ output.

Perhaps policymakers should be careful what they wish for.  The care provided in the American hospital of 2013 seems eerily similar to that of the hospital of the year 2000, albeit far more expensive.    This is despite some powerful incentives for manufacturers and inventors to innovate (like an aging boomer generation, advances in materials, and a revolution in genetics), and the widespread persistence of  fee for service insurance payment that rewards hospitals for offering a more complex product.

Technology junkies should feel free to quarrel with these observations.  But the last major new imaging platform in the health system was PET , which was introduced into hospital use in the early 1990’s.  Though fusion technologies like PET/CT and PET/MR were introduced later, the last “got to have it” major imaging product was the 64 slice CT Scanner, which was introduced in 1998.  Both PET and CT angiography were subjects of fierce controversy over CMS decisions to pay for the services.

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Open Research For Open Cures: A Report From Sage Congress

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By Andy Oram

Over four years of Congresses, Sage Bionetworks has drawn together leading thinkers and doers throughout the fields of genetic research and drug development. For two days each year, the conference floor is colonized by clumps of eagerly networking PhDs from academic, pharma, government, non-profits, biotech firms, and patient advocacy groups–people who often glide from one domain to another within this tight-knit cohort.

A cohort, certainly, we can characterize this group of attendees, sharing as they do a mysterious language drawn from years of research most of us will never understand. But is it a community? That will be tested over the following year as Sage Bionetworks lets go of the Congress. Founder Stephen Friend says it is up to others to create the next Congress, and its success or failure will be a measurement of the sweat and passion that Friend and Sage have put into attempts to build a community.

Why should a reader look further at this struggle among a tiny elite, rather than clicking on the next article? Well, first, if you’re one of the 48% of Americans who took a prescription drug this month, you should be concerned about where new breakthrough drugs will emerge. If you visit this web site because you want a more responsive health care system that can match patients to treatments more quickly and cheaply, recognize that new methods are important nowhere as much as at the foundation of the system where new treatments are discovered. And if you are just curious about the potential for global cross-institutional teams and loose networks connecting experts with ordinary members of the public to find creative solutions to old problems, this article will provide insights.

Don’t get too close, you don’t know what I have

The premise on which Friend founded Sage is that research and drug development have stagnated and cannot progress without more collaboration and data sharing. Therefore, with all due regard for the presentations at the recent Sage Congress on cancer research projects and other individual experiments, the real theme of the conference is in the keynotes about open source, the use of social media, and crowdsourcing. The challenge of this community–if we find that it has indeed become a community–is to analyze and deal with the particular challenges that genetic research and drug development inject into trends toward open collaboration.

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Do Our Cells Have Their Own IP Address Yet?

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By Ali Ansary

In the future, implanted chips will have the ability to stop food absorption when caloric intake reaches 2200. Cells in our forearm will be able to monitor our glucose levels and adjust our insulin appropriately. These implantable cells or “chips” have their own IP address with their own circuitry that is connected to a network 24/7. Through this network, cells communicate with real-time super computers to synthesize the next step for an individual’s body. If Dr. Anthony Atala can utilize 3D printers to create a new kidney, then it is only a matter of time before we can incorporate the circuitry within an organ necessary to monitor its function wirelessly.

This was the future I was challenged to paint in my talk at TEDMED 2012 at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. With the conclusion of  TEDMED 2013 last week, I ask myself, where are we one year later?

A caveat: The following are simple overviews on novel technologies I had been tracking over the past year and does no justice to the many amazing leaps we have made in innovative science and medicine during this time.

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Driving Front Line Innovation In Health Care

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By David Duncan

Jennifer Stinson was a nurse at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto who enjoyed brainstorming new ideas for improving care, especially for the kids with cancer she treats. But even as she gained status by getting her PhD and becoming a clinician scientist, she came up against persistent bureaucratic and organizational barriers to innovation.

Stinson’s challenge is common at big organizations, but overcoming bureaucracy and breaking down silos is especially critical in healthcare. To tackle these obstacles at SickKids, CEO Mary Jo Haddad in 2010 elevated innovation to a “strategic direction,” and engaged Innosight to help devise a full system needed to spur innovation. The resulting system has three major components:

  1. An Innovation blueprint detailing the types of innovations the organization wants to encourage. SickKids prioritized encouraging doctors, nurses and clinicians to look for unmet needs they could address, rather than wait for solutions from IT or top management. That required creating a focus group with 25 front-line healthcare workers to discover and catalog key “jobs to be done” (like reducing the length of hospital visits), surveying all 5,000 employees, and training most of them on how to integrate the innovation system into their daily practices.
  2. An innovation pipeline to reliably take ideas from concept to reality. This involved establishing a new 18-member Central Innovation Group of leaders from different areas of the hospital, a team that was tasked with prioritizing and advancing ideas and projects through various stages. The team helped innovators test prototypes, make adjustments, and then scale to a wider population.
  3. An innovation culture that features the right people, in the right roles, speaking a common language of innovation. A key enabler of this culture was the establishment of a $250,000 Innovation Fund to provide seed money for promising ideas. Now, instead of being stalled by permission hurdles that suppress initiative, promising new ideas could be funded, fast-tracked and prototyped.

Consider how the new system helped Stinson bring a transformative innovation to life. Every year at SickKids, thousands of children are battling various forms of cancer. It’s vital that they keep accurate diaries tracking their pain, but if it’s not done daily the data are virtually worthless. Typically these diaries must be filled out by hand, an annoying task that children with cancer aren’t motivated to do. The result is poor reporting and suboptimal pain management.

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The Affordable Care Act: Like It Or Not, It’s Catalyzing a Golden Age In Health Care Investing

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By Al Waxman

Now that President Obama has been re-elected and the Supreme Court has upheld the Accountable Care Act, healthcare reform is here to stay. So what does reform mean for healthcare investors? I believe it will usher in a new fertile period for innovative,venture‐backed companies that can navigate the brave new world of healthcare delivery and management.

The Accountable Care Act impact on healthcare IT investing is already being felt.Venture investment in 2013 is showing significant growth from last year. In 2012,according to PWC, a global accounting firm,the life sciences sector which includes healthcare IT accounted for 25 percent of all venture capital dollars invested which totaled nearly $1.2 billion in 163 deals,more than double the $480 million in 49 deals in 2011 and almost six‐times the $211 million in 22 deals in 2010.

Now is the time to make order out of chaos and to set the stage for a next‐generation healthcare system that can effectively service our nation. At Psilos Group, we have just released our fifth Healthcare Economics and Innovation Outlook and identified the following four areas as the most promising opportunities for healthcare investors in 2013 and beyond: Private health exchanges, consumer‐focused insurance programs, 21st century healthcare technologies, and innovations that reduce error and waste.

Investing In Exchanges

The healthcare insurance marketplace—and the way insurance is bought and sold—is facing massive change.Healthcare insurance exchanges, both public and private,promise to create a more organized and competitive market for buying healthcare insurance, which could moderate price increases that are currently spiraling out of control.

From our perspective, exchanges are an intelligent place to invest. Software and services will power the exchanges. Psilos envisions massive opportunities for technologies that enable operators of both public and private exchanges to build high functioning platforms, including the shopping software and back‐end administrative technology and service products needed to serve tens of millions of people efficiently.

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Doctors: We Can’t Leave It to Business to Educate Us

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By Leslie Kernisan, MD

Recently I came across yet another media article with suggestions as to how digital health products can gain more widespread adoption. The writer notes that “we can learn a lot from the pharma and healthcare industries,” and goes on to discuss the importance of engaging the doctor.

This article, like many I read, doesn’t acknowledge the downsides of using pharma’s tactics.

I have to assume that this is because from a business perspective, there aren’t a lot of downsides to pharma’s tactics. Pharma, along with many other healthcare industry players (hospitals, insurance companies, device manufacturers) has overall been extremely successful from a business standpoint.

So if the intent is to help digital health companies succeed as businesses, then by all means one should encourage them to copy pharma’s tactics.

But as we know, what works for business has often not worked well for serving the needs of individual patients, or to society from a health services and public health perspective.

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App Prescribing: The Future of Patient-Centered Care

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By Ben Chodor

Dr. Leslie Kernisan recently wrote a great piece about app prescribing, asking, “Should I be prescribing apps, and if so, which ones?” Since Happtique is all about integrating apps into clinical practice, I jumped at the chance to add to this important discussion.

Dr. Kernisan is right to be concerned and somewhat skeptical about app prescribing. More than 40,000 health apps exist across multiple platforms. And unlike other aspects of the heavily-regulated healthcare marketplace, there is little to no barrier to entry into the health app market—so basically anyone with an idea and some programming skills can build a mobile health app. The easy entry into the app market offers incredible opportunity for healthcare innovation; however, the open market comes with certain serious concerns, namely, “how credible are the apps I am (or my patients are) using?”

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