Relentless Health Value

Will the Health and Human Services (HHS) proposal materially impact Pharma’s ability to “pay to play” on pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) formularies? We have that HHS proposal that is now at the stage where they’re trying to figure out how to implement it. What’s at stake right now is that implementation flowchart and who exactly […]

Today I’m talking with John Lynn, founder of Healthcare Scene as well as two conferences, EXPO.health and HITMC. If I was going to frame out an overarching theme, I would suggest that it is this: Organizational culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Let’s consider the scope of this statement: Ambulatory patients spend about […]

No one denies that it’s a tough world out there for health start-ups. Finding a customer is tough, financial models are tough to figure out, operationalizing is tough. But the same is true for those other health care stakeholders attempting to purchase and implement the innovations start-ups are creating. Here’s another unassailable truth: Everything is […]

Let’s talk about the opioid crisis for a moment. When we say the words “opioids crisis,” as a general broad stroke, many people immediately picture somebody who lives under a bridge. But that actually wouldn’t be your average profile of someone with a substance misuse/opioid problem. The average profile of someone with an opioid/substance misuse […]

There’s a great video of Steve Jobs responding to an audience question that is, at a minimum, let’s just say strident. Jobs kind of ignores the aggressive nature of the query and offers a thoughtful response which is super relevant to health care. He says, “One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve […]

If you don’t know the nuts and bolts of the current Health and Human Services (HHS) proposal to nix Pharma’s ability to pay pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) rebates, then it’s possible you might want to listen to EP216 with Chris Sloan first. In this episode, we don’t talk much about the impact of the HHS […]

Surprise billing … it sounds like so much fun. Who doesn’t love a surprise? Except receiving a surprise bill is zero fun. In case you’ve been out of the loop on this, surprise billing is when the patient, unbeknownst to them, racks up out-of-network charges, usually at a hospital. The patient may have done absolutely […]

It turns out, patient-centric care that produces outcomes patients care about is usually less expensive than care that is not. The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), an independent nonprofit, nongovernmental organization in Washington, DC, was authorized by Congress in 2010. PCORI was established to fund research that can help patients make better-informed decisions, guided by […]

“Those who say it cannot be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.” That’s a James Baldwin quote to keep in mind while considering employers ginning up real change in the health care industry. Generally speaking, employers who still don’t believe they could have an impact helping their employees get better health care at […]

Last time I looked this up online, there were more than 5000 companies offering digital medicine tools. Which ones worked? Which ones are less good than others? Which ones have not been tested? How were they tested: apples to apples or a whole fruit basket of standards? If you’re a clinician or the head of […]