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Seriously, Aon, you think weight loss drugs save money?

By AL LEWIS

Last month Aon, the major benefits consulting firm, released a “study” claiming:

A significant opportunity to reduce healthcare costs for employers and enhance overall workforce health through a comprehensive obesity management program that includes GLP-1 medications.

This, of course, is the opposite of what most researchers have shown.  And in the immortal words of the great philosophers Dire Straits: “Two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong.” We’ll shortly see who’s wrong (um, meaning about weight loss drugs) when we dive into the study in a minute. But first, let’s review Aon’s previous analyses. 

A brief history of Aon

Aon claimed that Accolade saved 8%, but it looks like they must coincidentally have been absent both on the day that the biostatistics professor explained how control groups work, and also on the day the fifth-grade math teacher explained how averages work. 

Then, they claimed that Lyra – which is a mental health company – achieved the following non-mental improvements in the set of patients who had at least one mental health encounter with one of their “220,000 high-quality providers”:

§  A 30% reduction in non-mental health-related ER visits

§  A 30% reduction in generic drug spending

§  A 20% reduction in specialty drug spending

Thanks in part to starting the y-axis at $4000 to improve the optics, Aon also revealed that Lyra achieved a very high “efficiency ratio”:

A graph of a number of people

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

I can’t object to that finding because – despite three decades in this field, about 100 articles/interviews/quotes/citations including the Wall Street Journal, two trade-bestselling books and one Harvard Business School case study – I still don’t know what an “efficiency ratio” is, other than that has nothing to do with comparing participants to non-participants in a mental health study. Apparently an “efficiency ratio” in healthcare measures how quickly a hospital turns over its inventory. So Aon’s use of the term recalls the immortal words of the great philosopher Bob Uecker: “Juuussst a bit outside.”

When publicly and privately asked to explain any of these things, Aon clammed up. That was likely wise on their part.

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Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 146 | Can We Call it Digital Health Anymore?

Can we call this digital health anymore? What do we call it? On Episode 146 of Health in 2 Point 00, Jessica DaMassa asks me about Amwell filing for their S1, Lyra Health getting $110M to develop their mental health platform, PatientPop raising $50M to improve SEO for doctors and patients (they also brought Johnathan Bush on their board!), Brightline closing $20M for their behavioral health platform for kids, and Science 37 getting $40M for their site-less clinical trialsMatthew Holt

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Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 112 | COVID-19, HealthDevJam & loads of deals

Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess is joining somebody for their self quarantine in the Oval Office! Shenanigans aside, I give a quick coronavirus update and a shameless plug before diving into our regular coverage of all the deals. As for COVID-19, there’s a ton of activity going on in the digital health world with companies trying to figure out how they can help with this. Catalyst will be presenting some of that, either this weekend or early next week. Next, there’s an FHIR-related HealthDevJam event (free, online) TODAY at 1pm Eastern with lots of great people speaking.

Diving into some non-coronavirus related deals, eConsult company RubiconMD raises $18 million, Lyra Health getes a chunk of change—$75 million—for its mental health platform, Fruit Street Health gets $17 million from an unlikely source, b.well raises $16 million for what’s not a personal health record, and CVS announces that it added 5 digital health companies to its point solution management system. Finally, there’s been some sneaky stuff uncovered about Sanofi. Tune in for all the details on Episode 112. —Matthew Holt

Health in 2 point 00, Episode 23

In this start your weekend off right edition, Jessica DaMassa asks me about Andy Slavitt’s new Town Hall venture fund announced at HLTH, the ATHN buyout, Novartis paying Michael Cohen, Trump’s drug price speech & Lyra Health’s $45m raise….all in 2 minutes–Matthew Holt