Home

The Challenge of Assessing Value in a Value-Based Healthcare System

September 21, 2016
5:56 pm

The Healthcare Leadership Council released its National Dialogue for Healthcare Innovation (NDHI) policy recommendations earlier this year. One of the core policy reforms we advocate involves concrete steps to speed the process by which new treatments and therapies receive federal approval and become accessible to patients and physicians.

However, just as important as accelerating the approval process is ensuring that patients have access to these treatments once they become available. HLC is pleased to cosponsor an upcoming event that will look at factors that could have a profound effect on patient access to care and health system value.

The National Pharmaceutical Council is hosting a conference in Washington, D.C., on September 29 that will be dedicated to the issue of value assessment frameworks. These frameworks are being developed by various organizations to evaluate new biopharmaceutical treatments and medical technologies and determine if they add value to the health system or, conversely, if they simply add excessive costs without a commensurate improvement in patient health. These initiatives are intended to ultimately have an impact on coverage and reimbursement decisions.

HLC strongly advocates the health system’s transition from fee-for-service to pay-for-value, but we have also insisted that cost containment must be balanced with improved care quality. The development of value assessment frameworks will have a significant impact on maintaining this balance. We look forward to the September 29 forum at which these issues will be discussed in detail.

Utilizing Technology to Propel Precision Medicine Forward

April 04, 2016
11:18 am

As we’ve seen, there has been a steadily increasing level of discussion and enthusiasm surrounding precision medicine.  The Healthcare Leadership Council (HLC) has remained engaged in this conversation, given the expertise and involvement of its members.  HLC hosted a briefing on Capitol Hill last April on the subject, in which Bio-Reference Laboratories, New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center and Mayo Clinic detailed the benefits that have already been realized, and the potential that has yet to be reached.  They each shared stories of how targeted therapy transformed the lives of patients in ways that conventional medicine could not.  Although the cost of sequencing will continue to benefit and see increased usage from price declines, early genetic testing has allowed for immediate diagnosis and treatment, bypassing the costly trial and error approach.  Our member experts all agreed that one organization alone cannot succeed in integrating genome based knowledge into personalized care.

Last year the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) was announced by the National Institute of Health (NIH).  This year the White House hosted a PMI Summit, in which President Obama both participated and partnered with the NIH in an educational tweet chat that answered questions from the public regarding the initiative.  During this chat, NIH Director Francis Collins cited a paradox, “Only by studying populations at scale can you really understand individual differences.”  The PMI Cohort Program is currently working towards collecting one million or more participants that reflect the diversity of our country.

Precision medicine is an area that would directly benefit from the ability to collect, store and share data electronically.  In order to see real success, harmonization of data privacy laws is a necessary next step.  Diverse state privacy regulations regarding patient information accompany HIPAA laws, adding to the complexity of sharing data in a way that would improve the quality of patient care.  Federal rules for research subjects intersect with additional privacy policies that are also burdensome to the healthcare system.  The ability to utilize any data gathered from partnering facilities is an important function, and dialogue between the federal government and states is needed to ensure this is feasible across the country.  This is a field of health policy we have discussed fully in the Healthcare Leadership Council’s recently-released “VIable Options: Six Steps to Transform Healthcare Now” policy recommendations. The U.S. is on the cusp of a new era in healthcare, and the flow of health data is a crucial part of it.

Bringing Value to the Patient and the Healthcare System: A New Report

February 04, 2016
4:52 pm

This week the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC) unveiled its fifth annual report on the patient centered medical home’s (PCMH) impact on cost and quality.  In the quest to improve population health and reduce cost, PCPCC has collected data from peer-reviewed studies on medical homes’ costs and utilization.  Several Healthcare Leadership Council (HLC) members – Anthem, Aetna, Johnson & Johnson, McKesson, Merck, Premier and Takeda — are executive members of PCPCC. The results are instructive in the continuing discussion on how to elevate healthcare quality while containing overall spending.  Key takeaways from the report include:

  • A focus on primary care drives down cost and utilization
  • Best results came from sites that used multiple payers
  • It is essential to align payment with performance

The panel that discussed the findings included Marci Nielsen, CEO of PCPCC, Alissa Fox, SVP of the Office of Policy and Representation at Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Chris Koller, President of Milbank Memorial Fund, and Len Nichols, Director of the Center for Health Policy Research and Ethics at George Mason University.

The experts stated that PCMH’s have demonstrated the ability to control costs by providing the right care.  Delivery reform and payment reform go hand in hand; one will not succeed without the other.  As the nation works toward a value-based healthcare system it is important to be mindful of the cost of transformation.  Incentives must be right, there will be a need for antitrust exemptions, and the industry will rely on national standards but local relationships.  Currently, fee-for-service does not reimburse services that are key to coordinating patient care.  The PCMH model is not one size fits all, according to the panel, and more research is needed to identify which varying components are demonstrating the most value.  Defining measures and identifying best practices are necessary steps in ensuring successful implementation of the PCMH model.

This discussion on how to improve value within the healthcare system will reach an important juncture later this month when the Healthcare Leadership Council unveils specific policy recommendations – endorsed by virtually all sectors of the healthcare industry in addition to patient advocacy organizations – on how to remove barriers to quality-enhancing, cost-saving health innovations.  Watch this space for more information.

A Thoughtful Discussion on Drug Pricing and Innovation

October 05, 2015
11:53 am

There has been a lot of talk of late about the price of prescription drugs.  Most of it, unfortunately, has come in the form of 30-second sound bites, largely driven by one hedge fund investor’s decision to significantly raise the price of a single product.

Determining the correct price for an innovative, life-changing product to achieve both consumer accessibility as well as a return on investment, which is vital to fund future research and development, is a complex topic that warrants a thoughtful discussion, not glib attack lines.

Credit, then, goes to the Washington Post for its lengthy question-and-answer article with Joseph Jimenez, the CEO of Novartis, one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies.  In the interview, Jimenez made, I believe, several striking and instructive points.  Among them:

On price versus value:

“When you look at the cost of development, it continues to go up and up and up. So when we price a drug, we price it based on the value it will bring into that marketplace, and also how its price compares to the other therapies currently on the market. There’s been a lot of discussion about drug pricing. What we have to do is we have to shift that conversation away from the price toward the value. Like, what exactly is the value of this drug that is going to result in a positive outcome? And is society willing to pay for that drug?”

On the ability to use genomics to reduce the overall cost of drugs to society:

“Technology has improved so much in drug development that we now can find genetic markers on patients to ensure that they will benefit from our drug, and we’ll know those patients who won’t benefit from the drug. For example, we just launched a new lung cancer drug that only works in about 3 percent of patients with lung cancer, because only 3 percent have this particular genetic mutation. So we’re able to go to the payers and say, “Yes, this is an expensive drug in absolute, when you think about one patient taking this drug, but you’re not going to waste one dollar on this drug, because we’re only giving it to 3 percent of this population and the impact on the budget is quite small.”

On the value of pharmaceutical collaboration with academia:

“Academic collaborations are very important for the pharmaceutical industry because we do not spend money on basic research, we spend money on applied research. When there’s basic biology that has to be understood, an academic institution is going to be much better at doing that than Novartis. If we partner with them, we can take that learning and we can turn it into a drug.”

I recommend you read the full interview, which can be found here.  Mr. Jimenez’s thoughts provide a foundation for a reasonable discussion regarding medical innovation and patient access, the kind of conversation our society needs to have.

Documenting the Better Care, Lower Cost Advantages of Medicare Advantage

September 03, 2015
11:59 am

A study published in this month’s edition of the American Journal of Managed Care brings hard data to an argument many of us have been making for some time, that private Medicare Advantage plans are doing a superior job of delivering high-quality care at less cost than traditional Medicare.

The study, led by Dr. Bruce E. Landon of the Harvard Medical School and funded by a grant from the National Institute on Aging, examined price-standardized resource usage and care delivery for patients with diabetes or cardiovascular disease in both Medicare Advantage plans and traditional fee-for-service Medicare.  The takeaways from the study included:

•    For both health conditions examined, relative resource use was lower in Medicare Advantage plans than it was in traditional Medicare

•    Although there was variation among individual plans, quality of care for diabetes and cardiovascular disease was higher in Medicare Advantage plans.

The study concludes, “Proponents of managed care have long argued that integrated health plans can deliver care more efficiently than traditional fee-for-service care by using their ability to tailor their provider networks to the needs of their population and to implement disease and case management programs to improve chronic disease management.  In this large national study of enrollees with diabetes or cardiovascular disease, our findings suggest that many Medicare HMO health plans are able to deliver care of equal or better quality with lower (resource usage) than traditional Medicare.”

These findings, I would add, echo what we hear at the Healthcare Leadership Council on a regular basis from not only our health plan members, but also from hospital leaders – that, in terms of attacking chronic disease in a cost-efficient way, Medicare Advantage has a strong upper hand over conventional Medicare.