Are You Prepped for a Health Care Hurricane?

Are we prepared for a possible health care storm?

It's hurricane season, and it's also the season of the Patient Protection and the Affordable Care Act. Obviously this directly affects the Pharmaceutical industry. Will it be a Class 5 disaster or a pleasant tropical breeze? We clearly don't know. Predictions abound, and many political factions are posturing and offering their thoughts. Most offer an extreme outlook on one side or the other.

I've visited over a dozen web sites this week looking for some consistency. I scoured news sites, analyst sites, and manufacturer sites, and I still have no clear idea how this will play out. The range of opinions and lack of consensus is downright intimidating. Some say this will revolutionize health care for all Americans. Others say it will be a bumpy ride for years, before we get it right. And still others say it will be the demise of quality health care as we know it.

So here we sit with far more questions than answers. Here are just a few causing loss of sleep in our industry.

• Will some pharmaceutical companies take a financial hit under the new system, while others benefit?
• How will it affect our market share?
• Is our pipeline strategically sound given this new health care reform?
• How will company health care plans be overhauled under the new plan?
• Will patients receive better treatment?
• Will HCPs know how to navigate the system?
• Will payers be able to process the reimbursements properly and in a timely manner?

I must admit that I don't trust any of the predictions I read. The issues are polarized beyond understanding. This is one instance where we should prepare for the worst and hope for the best. The key here is preparation.

Here are some points every pharmaceutical company should review before the program begins enrolling patients on October 1.

• Are we prepared to make quick and informative communications to the public?
• Have we game planned many of the possible issues that may arise?
• Will we add clarity or chaos to the mix of information?
• Is our customer service group staffed up and adequately trained?
• Have our reps been communicating with their HCP clients about the changes under the PPACA?
• Have we been working with providers and plans to ensure we are in compliance with their new processes?
• Are our pharmacy customers comfortable with the new processes for receiving and dispensing our products?

What are your thoughts on the PPACA? Leave a comment.

A Game Changer for Health Outcomes - A Little TLC

A little TLC goes a long way for improving health outcomes

An article in Wired Magazine (February 2013) caught my attention. We all know about the Placebo Effect. It's been vetted and verified. The human mind is capable of some amazing things, and in some cases, it is responsible for positive health outcomes even when given a placebo.

Along those lines, Wired states that how a patient is treated by an HCP can also make a significant difference in health outcomes. If the patient believes the HCP cares about her well being, and this is demonstrated through empathetic actions, the outcomes are better than if the treatment is administered without any personal empathy with the patient.

One NEJM-published study showed that patients with arthritic knees fared no better with arthroscopic surgery than with a placebo. According to the article, "Many patients who really need empathy and advice are instead given drugs and surgery."

Imagine the savings in spending if the health care industry adopted a more caring philosophy first, instead of immediately going down the path of more traditional treatments.

I'm certain that some stakeholders would push back, but in the long run, what's best for the patient is the ultimate barometer.

Read full article

Wired's "Think Big" issue

You Have a $Trillion Coin for Health Care - Now What?

How would you spend $1 Trillion to improve health care?

TalkBack Hotline
Tell us your plan by calling (609) 415-0204

Here's the situation. You have been given a Trillion Dollar Coin to use any way you wish to improve health care in the U.S. What would you do? There are unlimited possibilities. Here are just a few basic ideas to prime the pump.

• Give money to medical research organizations (Cancer, Alzheimers, etc.)
• Build more/better hospitals
• Fund the U.S. health care system (Obamacare)
• Fund Medicare/Medicaid
• Give endowments to medical schools for scholarships and grants
• Build more/better elderly care facilities
• Buy a pharmaceutical company and hand pick its new CEO
• Provide capital to promising life science startups

One trillion dollars is 1,000 parcels of one billion dollars each. How you divide it up and who it goes to is your call.

Call our TalkBack hotline at (609) 415-0204 and tell us your plan. We'll publish some of the responses on this blog and on our social media channels. Keep your response on topic and non-promotional, please.

Be bold. Be brilliant.

Is this Jeopardy Champion Smarter than a Human Doctor?

Watson sets its sights on saving lives

I read a very interesting article in the November issue of Fast Company magazine.

Watson, IBM's wunderkind supercomputer, achieved a milestone when it won a game of Jeopardy in 2011 against human opponents. But the folks at Big Blue weren't going to rest on their laurels. They had bigger mountains to climb.

Watson never goes on vacation. And it never forgets a fact. On the contrary, it keeps learning.

Watson can review, assimilate, and store more data in a day than any human can do in a lifetime. One example given in the article is that Watson can ingest all of the world's medical journals in the time it takes a physician to drink a cup of coffee.

Obviously, for the foreseeable future, human physicians will be a key part of the diagnostic and treatment process. But when it comes to the grunt work that can break open a perplexing case, you simply cannot beat a computer, even if you are the enigmatic doctor in the TV show House. Armed with every medical article, info on every drug, every treatment option, and the ability to cross-reference all this information in minutes, is intriguing. Watson will not give us a single answer in most cases. It will give us a range of options, and levels of confidence for each option, but the final decision will rest with a living, breathing physician.

Doctors at Sloan-Kettering are prepping a Watson computer for real patients. A diagnosis that could have taken weeks, and resulted in merely a best-guess by a physician or a medical team, may only take minutes by Watson. That may mean the difference between life and death for many patients.

Insurers are tapping into Watson, too. Wellpoint is using a Watson to aid in approving medical procedures.

Watcon represents what IBM calls the third computer age: Cognitive Computing. True artificial intelligence. Machines will learn to speak in our language. It's a huge leap over tabulating machines, and programmable systems, which represented the first two ages of computing.

Imagine what this technology will be like when we will have it on our smart phones. "Watson, can you take a look at this growth on my arm?"

Thought-provoking Health Videos

Some interesting videos on health issues

Here are a handful of videos that inspired, tantalized, or just hit me the right way and I had to share. I hope you learn as much from them as I have.

How Seduction Artists, Cult Leaders, and Con Men can Save Health Care – a Physician’s Story (over an hour)
Watch

Technology as a Preventative Weapon against Poor Health and Bad Behavior
Watch

The All-terrain Wheelchair – A Study in Design and User Feedback
Watch

Amazing Anatomical Paper Sculptures
Watch


Can we treat Alzheimers 20 years early?
Watch

Big Time Innovators in Health Care

Fast Company magazine published their 50 most innovative companies in March of 2012, including 10 related to health care. I thought I would revisit the list now that we've turned the page into 2013, and try to imagine what innovations will be in this year's list.

Some of these companies are big dogs, such as IBM, Walgreens, and 3M, while others are much smaller pups. Innovations come is all shapes and sizes, too. Innovations include an online tool that helps patients find the right doctor at the right price, medical intelligence software for disease surveillance and identifying health risks, a "Smart knee" motorized prosthesis, and a stethoscope that can stream high-quality audio to a specialist anywhere in the world (even from the International Space Station).

Every business can learn something from these companies. Anyone can innovate. If you're not innovating, you're falling behind.

How will you innovate in 2013? Check out these companies for inspiration.

1) National Marrow Donor Program
2) Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospitals
3) Walgreens
4) Castlight Health
5) AssistiveWare
6) IBM
7) Össur
8) Heritage Provider Network
9) Esri
10) 3M

See the detailed write-up of each company's innovations

Happy New Year!

Hospital of the (Near) Future

Every aspect of the building will be designed for the patient 

Who hasn't had a poor experience because of a bad hospital room? Who hasn't gotten lost in a maze of elevators, corridors, and waiting areas? Why is the cafeteria so hard to get to in many hospitals? Most antiquated hospital designs don't work for the patient or their visitors.

The typical hospital room, with its beige walls and stingy windows, carries a dim, funereal cast and works against patient well-being. The standard twin-bedded configuration doesn't help, fostering the spread of infection, making sleep difficult, and giving people at their sickest the dignity of life in a freshman dorm.

The latest issue of Fast Company magazine covers an emerging movement for modern, well-designed hospitals that cater to the patient, not just the doctors and nurses who pop in for a few minutes at a time. Administrators used to think cramming more patients in the same space was good for the bottom line. Maybe it was back then. Nobody likes to share a room with other patients when they are sick and uncomfortable, and patients have more choices for healthcare than they did in the past.

The new look hospitals will be a godsend to patients. All patients will have their own room, with large windows and comfortable beds. The rooms will be tech-savvy with a media wall, hi-speed WiFi and other modern technologies. Video chats can replace phone calls between patients and family or friends. Bathrooms will be spacious and accommodating - in contrast, many old hospital bathrooms aren't even large enough for a walker. In the new designs, nurses will have better line-of-sight angles to monitor their patients.

Single rooms for every patient - well appointed

Slanted rooms give patients views of the outside and of the media wall

What's changed to allow the design of a hospital to be more patient-friendly? The fee-for-service model is moving toward a flat fee for an entire episode of care, such as a hip replacement or a heart procedure. This will help eliminate over-billing for many things, such as the $150 Tylenol pill.

These changes are already in the works in some places, but the overall hospital system won't change overnight. While some new hospitals are utilizing these new designs, it will take decades to revamp or rebuild a majority of the 5,800 hospitals in the U.S. The best of the new hospitals will be built from the ground up, rather than retooling existing buildings.

Better hospitals will improve the level of care we can provide. This is exactly the kind of innovation we need.

Take Health Care off the Mainframe - a TED Talk

Dan Limbach

Intel is working on new ideas in health care.

Are there better ways to treat patients? Are we treating the illness rather than using technology to predict and prevent health issues before they become a bigger problem.

At TEDMED, Eric Dishman makes a bold argument: The US health care system is like computing circa 1959, tethered to big, unwieldy central systems: hospitals, doctors, nursing homes. As our aging population booms, it's imperative, he says, to create personal, networked, home-based health care for all.

View the video