Digital Healthcare Growth Drivers In 2020

It has been an extraordinary time for digital medicine and the new year will bring continued growth. The key drivers are expanded patient engagement as well as institutional investment with the ultimate goal of reducing costs. Big pharma, payers and insurance companies have recognized the business benefits of patient empowerment. Digital applications are helping patients become better decision makers for their own health by providing personalized insights. As companies and legislators seek to reduce health costs, digital tools are ever more attractive options to drive efficiencies. 

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

CVS: Low Cost Care Coming For Aetna Members In 2020

CVS Health’s top executive said its stores are focused on offering “80% of what a primary care physician can treat” as it rolls out its new HealthHub format and “zero” and “low copays” for certain Aetna health plan members using CVS services.

Speaking at the JPMorgan Chase Healthcare conference Tuesday, CVS chief executive Larry Merlo said the company remains on track to have 1,500 HealthHUBs operating by the end of 2021. This comes after the first 50 HealthHubs opened last year in four markets: Houston, Atlanta, Tampa and the market that includes Philadelphia and southern New Jersey.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

The economy of connecting

Right now, patients don’t know their own strength. But as they wake up to their emerging role as keepers of their own healthcare data, the economic clout that comes with ownership will hand them a controlling stake in the new business models that are set to disrupt traditional financing across the sector.

Forecasts give a strong indication of the potential scale of that role – and the reasons why technology startups, insurers, providers and researchers are gearing up for the age of value-based health, in which patients will trade their data as currency, investing in their own care outcomes and the tools that will help to identify and realise them.

The full Healthcare IT News article can be viewed at this link.  

Cigna Expands MDLive Telehealth Partnership To Primary Care

Health insurance giant Cigna is expanding online access to primary care physicians via its telehealth partner MDLive for the insurer’s employer-sponsored plan clients.

The move is significant because it greatly expands the use of telehealth and “virtual access” to doctors from the already existing behavioral health and urgent care services MDLive offers Cigna employer-sponsored health plan enrollees. The existing efforts could be considered more as a way to help patients avoid an unnecessary trip to the emergency room or get someone with mental health access quickly to avoid an adverse mental health outcome.

But with a primary health offering from MDLive, executives involved say Cigna is helping doctors more proactively manage the employee’s health, beginning with wellness screenings. MDLive says Cigna will be its first health insurer partner to “offer virtual care for preventive checkups, beginning in the second quarter of 2020.” The deal is a big one for MDLive, which is amid a competitive environment of telehealth companies that include American Well, Teladoc, Doctor On Demand and a host of other companies that include startups.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.

The Future Of Clinical Trials? Here Is A Simulation Model Of The Heart

Clinical trials can be very expensive, time consuming, and difficult to recruit for and run. They also can be far from perfect, yielding results that don't really match what happens in the "real world." In some cases, they can put patients at significant risk. Otherwise, no problem, right?

For years, medicine and health care have relied on the randomized clinical trial as the “gold standard” to evaluating an intervention, a drug, a medical device, or some other product. But in actuality, this standard has often been more gold-plated than true gold for the reasons mentioned above. Therefore, there’s been a need for new approaches to help fill the current gaps left by clinical trials. And something called The Living Heart Project has really gotten to the heart of this issue.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

The Boldest Healthcare Prediction For 2020: Business As Usual

As the decade turned and the 2020s began, news headlines made it seem as though the healthcare revolution was already underway. One banner boasted “2020: Another Year of Radical Change in Healthcare,” mirroring similar stories claiming that innovations and technologies will continue to transform medicine in the year ahead.  

Just one problem with these predictions: There’s no empirical or statistical evidence that American healthcare has undergone (or will soon undergo) any kind of radical change, or even meaningful improvement. 

In healthcare, the past is a reliable predictor of the future. And when you look at key performance measures—such as cost, quality and satisfaction—it’s clear that U.S. healthcare underperformed over the last decade.

So, why should we expect anything different in 2020 or in years to come? In short, we shouldn’t. Here’s why: 

1. Costs Keep Rising
2. U.S. Still Lags Far Behind Global Peers In Quality
3. Physician Burnout Up, Patient Satisfaction Down

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

Lyft Hails Major Hospital Partner In Sutter Health

The ride-sharing company Lyft and hospital giant Sutter Health are partnering to customize “individual transportation programs” for the hospital’s patients and health system employees throughout Northern California.

The deal announced Monday is significant for Lyft, which is tapping into a hospital industry that is under pressure to improve quality and reduce costs as health insurance payments move from fee-for-service medicine to value-based models. It’s all about getting healthcare in the right place, at the right time and in the right amount rather than fee-for-service reimbursement based on volume of care delivered so ride-sharing companies see a key role.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

Here’s How Tripling Prices Could Save You 40% On Your Medications

Medication prices in the US have gone from wild to insane; from expensive to outright unaffordable. But a tripling in prices could save us all a lot of money. Here’s how that would work.

It’s a policy known as external reference pricing. The idea is simple. First, the US government would look at how much a drug company charges for a given medication in a handful of other developed countries. Next, it would tie the US price to some multiple of that international price.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

Artificial Intelligence Makes Bad Medicine Even Worse

Google researchers made headlines early this month for a study that claimed their artificial intelligence system could outperform human experts at finding breast cancers on mammograms. It sounded like a big win, and yet another example of how AI will soon transform health care: More cancers found! Fewer false positives! A better, cheaper way to provide high-quality medical care!

Hold on to your exclamation points. Machine-enabled health care may bring us many benefits in the years to come, but those will be contingent on the ways in which it’s used. If doctors ask the wrong questions to begin with—if they put AI to work pursuing faulty premises—then the technology will be a bust. It could even serve to amplify our earlier mistakes.

The full WIRED article can be viewed at this link.  

The 2016 California policy to eliminate nonmedical vaccine exemptions and changes in vaccine coverage: An empirical policy analysis

Vaccine hesitancy, the reluctance or refusal to receive vaccination, is a growing public health problem in the United States and globally. State policies that eliminate nonmedical (“personal belief”) exemptions to childhood vaccination requirements are controversial, and their effectiveness to improve vaccination coverage remains unclear given limited rigorous policy analysis. In 2016, a California policy (Senate Bill 277) eliminated nonmedical exemptions from school entry requirements. The objective of this study was to estimate the association between California’s 2016 policy and changes in vaccine coverage.

The full article can be downloaded below.