Brainstorm Health: Value in Health Care, CHIP Safe for Six Years, Pharma and Trump Tax Cuts

The chart, as I said, shows the meager modern gains in healthful longevity. But purists will observe as well that straight-shot life expectancy is also on the downswing, at least in the U.S. Last month, the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics reported that life expectancy at birth in America fell for the second year in a row—a back-to-back drop we hadn’t witnessed for half a century.

In fairness, one can’t blame our existing healthcare paradigm for all of the backslide: The ongoing opioid epidemic has played a lead role. But you can certainly lay some of the blame at the system’s feet. So what could replace it? Well, as I noted yesterday, there’s a lot of buzz these days about a new archetype called the “value” or “outcomes-based” paradigm—which I was lucky enough to discuss with an all-star group of experts at the World Economic Forum this morning.

The panel included “stakeholders” across the spectrum of care, as they say: Laurie Glimcher, a physician and CEO of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, represented the viewpoint of “medical providers,” among others; Bruce Broussard, CEO of insurer Humana shared some light from the “payer” end; Omar Ishrak, CEO of Medtronic, and Christophe Weber, CEO of Takeda Pharmaceuticals, offered voices from the device and drug maker sides, respectively; and Frans van Houten, CEO of Philips, a company whose ambitious healthcare portfolio ranges from ultrasound machines to bioinformatics, offered a system-wide perspective.

Glimcher, who is also a respected immunology researcher, kicked off the session by speaking powerfully (and bluntly) about how the current financial model strains and drains physicians and academic medical scientists (in part through dwindling reimbursement rates and scant research funding). But she held out high hopes for a replacement framework that would view human health over the long term and pay doctors to focus on precision health and disease prevention—something the current system all but ignores.

The ultimate aim, in any case, is to somehow shift the compensation structure so that providers are paid based on achieving desired outcomes for patients—including, in theory, the prevention of illness—rather than on the individual services, pills, or procedures they offer.

How to do that? Well, first—all agreed—you have to find a way to measure what a “good” outcome ought to be—and what the baseline, or expected, outcome is now. And you have to measure enough stuff (from genetic markers to an untold number of blood proteins) in enough people to know what treatments would best work in specific subsets of those people (say, lung cancer patients with a certain driver mutation). In other words, to create a viable system that rewards for felicitous outputs rather than prodigious inputs, you have to measure the complete output of inputs. (That ain’t easy.)

Why, you wonder, would drug and device makers—whose stockholders demand that they keep selling more and more of their products for higher and higher prices—even want to switch to a value-based system…and do all this work to get there? I wondered that as well.

Medtronic’s Omar Ishrak had a ready reply: “Why wouldn’t everyone want a better outcome for less cost?”

For more on the World Economic Forum’s Value in Healthcare Project, check out their latest report, released today.

DIGITAL HEALTH

Ransomware continues to plague health care. It hasn't gotten much attention, but there was a pretty significant health care hack last week. Allscripts, the electronic health record firm, was the target of a ransomware attack and some patients still haven't regained access to its services. As we've covered previously, health care is a particularly favorite industry for cyber criminals, lagging only financial services in attacks.(Healthcare IT News)

INDICATIONS

The Trump tax cuts and pharma. U.S. pharma giant Johnson & Johnson announced Tuesday that it will be taking a $13.6 billion charge and repatriating billions of dollars to the United States as a result of the GOP tax law signed by President Donald Trump last year. It's that latest in a string of major pharmaceutical announcements regarding the law—and the biggest one announced to date, leap frogging Amgen.(Reuters)

THE BIG PICTURE

The Children's Health Insurance Program is safe... for now. The bipartisan deal to keep the federal government open includes a major health care provision: A six-year extension of the Children's Health Insurance Program, which covers some nine million children from lower- and middle-income families. But some are wondering why this extension isn't permanent, given that it has widespread bipartisan support and is actually projected to save the federal government money the longer it's around.(Fortune)

REQUIRED READING

How Investors Like Melinda Gates Are Helping These VCs Tackle Tech's Bro Problem, by Michal Lev-Ram

Super Bowl Ads Can't Save TV, by Erika Fry

Tech Dissatisfaction, Version 99.0, by Robert Hackett

SEC Chair Blasts Lawyers Over 'Disturbing' ICOs, by Jeff John Roberts