Healthcare Innovations

What a surprise: Drug companies study the bright side

For years, we've been letting the research publish the good news and hide the bad. Shame on us.

San Francisco Chronicle: UCSF study questions drug trial results. 2007-Jun-05, by Victoria Colliver

UCSF researchers looked at nearly 200 head-to-head studies of widely prescribed cholesterol-lowering medications, or statins, and found that results were 20 times more likely to favor the drug made by the company that sponsored the trial. "We have to be really, really skeptical of these drug-company-sponsored studies," said Lisa Bero, the study's author and professor of clinical pharmacy and health policy studies at the university.

Collaborating Across the Schools at Harvard

Brock Reeve, a Harvard MBA (and brother of late actor Christopher Reeve), is the Executive Director of the Havard Stem Cell Institute. His challenge is to get all the research institutes, and all the hospitals, and all the schools of Harvard to pull together and bring stem cell therapy to the healthcare market.

Boston Globe: He hopes to change culture of institute. 2007-Jun-11, by Pamela Ferdinand:

"There are so many cultural differences, and my hope is that people like Brock can help us get all of those obstacles out of the way so people can do what we hope they'll do," he said. One of the recent trickier issues involved negotiating intellectual property rights: how to coordinate investments in ongoing stem cell research with the various institutions and how to jointly market and profit from discoveries. Reeve's supporters say he handled it deftly. "Pulling the people together under one roof, saying we'll jointly fundraise and we'll make decisions about investing in projects across institutions, the HSCI executive committee is playing an internal venture capital role," Reeve said. "It's the first time Harvard has done that."

New Business Model for Pharma

All the news that I've heard indicates that pharmaceutical companies are outsourcing research so they can spend more on marketing. PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the big managment consultancy and accounting firm, seems to be alarmed by this trend. What do they know big pharma doesn't?

Financial Times: Pharmas urged to focus spending on R&D. 2007-Jun-13, by Andrew Jack

Pharmaceutical companies must shift more investment from marketing into research, and link their drug prices more tightly to efficacy in the next few years or face collapse, a new report on the industry’s future warns. In “Pharma 2020: the vision”, PwC, the consultancy, argues: “The current pharmaceutical industry business model is both economically unsustainable and operationally incapable of acting quickly enough to produce the types of innovative treatments demanded by global markets.”

2 points for Obama

Healthcare analyst Matthew Holt thinks Obama's on the right track, but watch for future developments.

Link: The Health Care Blog: TECH/POLICY: Obama--looking to Neal Patterson for a contribution?. 2007-Jun-11, by Matthew Holt

All you need to know is that health IT is roughly a $30 billion market now. Obama wants to pump it up another 25%. ...Actually to suspend my cynicism, I'm now among the converted and I think that this type of national program is a good idea, so long as it's done in conjunction with a significant change in incentives. We'll see how it shakes out as these proposals all develop.

New Sharing Tools

Structured sharing of information should allow the next big leap forward in medical research.

Government Health IT News: The wisdom of grids, 2007-Jun-4, by Maureen McKinney

Although still in its early stages, the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG), a network of networks for cancer researchers, is attracting considerable attention in the health care information technology community and is prompting fundamental questions about the way researchers and physicians will share medical data in the future. The idea for the cancer grid grew out of the National Cancer Institute’s strategic planning process. “One of the key things we knew was that in order to embrace molecularly targeted medicine and improve outcomes for cancer patients, we needed this kind of information sharing,” said Ken Buetow, associate director of bioinformatics and IT at NCI and director of its Center for Bioinformatics. “Existing forms of data sharing weren’t adequate…to integrate for the purposes of biomedicine, and we realized we needed this next-generation infrastructure.”

Investing in Reduced Cost

NY Times: Venture Fund to Seek Out Cost Cutters in Health Care. 2007-Jun-05, by Steve Lohr

Dr. David J. Brailer, a former senior health official in the Bush administration, is starting a $700 million private equity fund, Health Evolution Partners, with a different mission. “We’re going to be investing in things that can reduce the crushing costs of health care,” said Dr. Brailer, who was the administration’s national coordinator of health information technology....

Today, Dr. Brailer said, the opportunity lies in linking health information technology to services. As an example, he mentioned the possibility of putting inexpensive remote sensors in the home of a person with early-stage Alzheimer's disease...

Dr. Brailer said that he would not rule out an investment in a company offering technology or service to a hospital. “But mostly, we’re going to invest in things that keep people out of institutions,” he said.

Sustainable Pricing for Pharmaceuticals

I appreciate the call for a 'new system'--not just lower prices.

FT.com: Elan to swallow price pill. 2007-May-28, by Andrew Jack

The head of Elan, the Irish-based pharmaceutical group, has challenged the industry to overhaul its "unsustainable" commercial model and offer ground-breaking treatments at lower cost. Kelly Martin, a former banker who became chief executive in 2003, called for a new business pricing model, which he said Elan was likely to follow for its Alzheimer's treatments. "The psychology of the industry is that if you are first, the price should be high," he told the FT. "The economic structure is unsustainable. Tension will grow, and something has to give."

Flu Shots ARE a Commodity

When a primary care physician fails to establish a strong relationship with his or her patients, then those patients will become increasingly frustrated with the expense and inconvenience of getting simple tests and treatments. Those doctors have really brought this on themselves. If you have a chronic condition, you want continuity of care, but for healthy people, most tests and vaccinations are commodities.

Doctors' list puts a price on care - Los Angeles Times. 2007-May-28, by Lisa Girion

The move by Torrance-based HealthCare Partners Medical Group, which serves more than 500,000 patients, puts a significant crack in the ages-old reluctance by doctors and other medical providers to let consumers comparison shop for services such as chest X-rays, baby vaccinations and Pap smears.

HealthCare Partners quietly posted on its website last week prices for 58 common procedures....

The move was motivated in part by the rapid advance of walk-in medical clinics at drugstore chains and discount retailers, such as CVS Caremark Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc., where the prices of blood pressure checks and flu shots are as easy to spot as those for rubbing alcohol and cat food.