The big tech innovation from Amazon-Bershire Hathway-JP Morgan joint venture could be…

Narrow networks?  That is one proposition from Bill Gurley, a general partner at Benchmark Capital, in an article from Business Insider.  Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger, prefers the Kaiser model.

“If the whole nation had Kaiser Permanente care, the average quality of the care would go way up and the cost would go way down,” Munger has said.

Narrow networks are becoming standard, especially amongMedicare Advantage plans, or private insurance alternatives to Medicare. About 35% of Medicare Advantage members were in narrow network plans, while 22% were in broad-network plans in 2015, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. They’re also common in the Affordable Care Act marketplace.

But still, the majority of health plans aren’t built around narrow networks, especially employer-funded plans, which proponents of narrow networks say keeps healthcare costs high.

“I don’t know how we get to reform until there’s narrow networks,” Gurley said.

Sure, narrow networks could reduce cost by lower the price paid to providers.  But is that really going to fix the system.  One easy way to lower cost is just to create narrow networks based on cost, and ignore quality.  Because quality of care is so hard to measure, narrow networks appear to be a solution since cost declines, observable quality may decline modestly or not at all, but quality factors important to patients (but perhaps not payers) is likely to fall dramatically.  This is why there was the managed care backlash years ago.

Amitabh Chandra is skeptical that the Amazon-Berkshire Hathaway-JP Morgan can solve the health care problem in ways that larger organizations that specialize in health care (e.g., Kaiser Permanente, United Healthcare) have not yet thought of.

Why have Kaiser that insures 10m lives and United that insures 45m lives failed at this, and how will Atul make more progress with 1m lives? #HealthPolicyTwitter will view this as being stubborn, but it's a question that MBAs are trained to ask https://t.co/CPQkL8A4TZ

— Amitabh Chandra (@amitabhchandra2) June 23, 2018

It appears that Atul Gawande is hiring people for this joint venture project. How exactly he plans to create a new paradigm to improve quality and reduce cost, however, is not entirely clear.

The big tech innovation from Amazon-Bershire Hathway-JP Morgan joint venture could be… posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

ACOs transform physicians from entrepreneurs into salarymen

That is the finding from a recent study by Mahajan et al. (2018).  The authors use data from the American Community Survey between 2011.  They compare hours worked and the share of physicians who were self-employed over time.  To determine whether any changes were correlated with increaed Accountable Care Organization market share, the authors examined regional variation — where region is defined as a hospital referral region (HRR) — in physician work profile based on the change in ACO market share in a given HRR.  They found that:

a 10–percentage point increase in accountable care organization enrollment in a hospital referral region was associated with a statistically significant reduction of 0.82 work hours per week among male physicians. In addition, the 10–percentage point increase was associated with a decrease of 2% in the probability of all physicians being self-employed.

With individual physicians or small physician practices no longer bearing the full risk and reward from their practice, we see that physicians appear less entrepreneurial, work fewer hours, and are more likely to be an employee than an owner or partner.  Your thoughts on whether you believe this is a positive or negative development likely depend on whether you believe that physician entrepreneurs lead to more innovation, creativity and effort or the profit motive will distort physician incentives.

• HT: AJMC In Focus Blog.

ACOs transform physicians from entrepreneurs into salarymen posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

Pre-Existing Conditions: A Bipartisan, National Health Priority

Pre-existing conditions impact Americans north, south, east and west, the Kaiser Family Foundation maps. But those maladies aren’t evenly distributed across the U.S.: the highest incidences of people with pre-existing conditions are generally dotted in the eastern half of the U.S., in diverse metropolitan areas

A striking aspect of this map is that one metro that has a higher rate of people with pre-existing conditions can co-exist in a state with another town whose population is much healthier, just a short drive apart. The report points to Florence and Charleston, in South Carolina: the former town has a relatively high incidence of people with pre-existing conditions at 34%, while the latter records a lower proportion at 24%.

Similarly, the Kingsport Tennessee MSA records a 41% of people with pre-existing conditions, versus Nashville at 27%.

Thus we public health folk say that a person’s ZIP code can be more important than her genetic code. Where we live may pump clean water, have safer schools and access to healthier food at fair prices, staff more primary care physicians and access points like ambulatory health centers, and have a majority of people who shun smoking cigarettes.

Or not.

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  Pre-existing conditions are a big deal to Americans these days: among registered voters, ensuring that health plans cover pre-existing conditions is the most important health care issue on Americans’ minds, the June 2018  Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll found.

The second chart (called Figure 3 in the KFF poll report) illustrates this political fact. Protecting pre-existing conditions in health insurance outranks lowering the price of prescription drugs and repealing the ACA, voters say.

On a party-identification basis, this sentiment is shared across a majority of Democrats, Independents and Republicans, the third chart illustrates.

KFF conducted this poll in June 2017, asking the question based on two scenarios: whether the Federal government should prohibit health insurance companies from charging people with pre-existing health conditions more for coverage; or, whether States should be able to decide whether insurers can charge people with pre-existing conditions more if they don’t have continuous coverage.

When it comes to pre-existing conditions, we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper, it seems, Americans are saying.

As Bruce Springsteen presciently sang in 1984 on the Born in the USA album, “Cover Me” —   whichever town or state I live in, and whatever my political party ID.

Springsteen’s lyrics preach it like a patient facing healthcare sticker shock, an out-of-control medical bill caused by out-of-network or costs-without-insurance:

The times are tough now, just getting tougher

This whole world is rough, it’s just getting rougher

Cover me, come on baby, cover me.

Whether I’m sick or not, just cover me, Americans insist.

The post Pre-Existing Conditions: A Bipartisan, National Health Priority appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.

Pre-Existing Conditions: A Bipartisan, National Health Priority posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

The pros and cons of indication-specific pricing

Most products–especially commodities–are sold with a single price.  You can buy an iPhone for largely the same price throughout the country.   In the case of pharmaceuticals, however, there may be a case that prices should vary depending on their use.  For instance, there may be a treatment which provides large benefits to patients with disease A and modest benefits to patients with disease B. A paper by Cole, Towse, Lorgelly, and Sullivan (2018) outlines three ways that drug prices could vary by indication to reflect differential value:

a single drug authorised under different brand names with different prices; distinct “discounts” applied to different indications, and a single weighted average price.

Types of differential pricing schemes

Examples of how one could allow a drug’s price to vary by use include:

• Differential payment by approved indication (for example Trastuzumab for HER2+ breast cancer and gastric cancer)
• Differential payment by line of therapy or sequencing of use (for example Trastuzumab in early and late stage breast cancer)
• Differential payment by use as a single or combination therapy (for example product used on its own vs in combination with a competitor product)
• Conditional payment based on cumulative treatment volume (for example a cap on payment above a certain total volume)
• Conditional payment based on treatment completion (for example payment is only made if a patient completes their treatment course)
• Episodic (bundled) payment (for example payment for a six-month period that would include all chemotherapy and administration costs)
• Outcomes-based payment agreements

General thoughts on price discrimination

More generally, the economics literature on price discrimination finds that indication specific pricing in a static sense will improve profits for producers but may or may not improve overall social welfare.  The former holds because if price discrimination did not improve profits, there is always the option of reverting to the single price.  For price discrimination to improve welfare, we would need price sensitive individuals to buy more goods than the could otherwise without price discrimation.  As the authors state clearly: “Price discrimination increases welfare if and only if it increases the total volume consumed.”

A simple example of indication-specific pricing in action

If life sciences set the price to maximize profits, they may set a high price reflecting the value provided to patients with disease A.  Patients with disease B (or their insurers) will not buy this treatment because the price will exceed the value to patients.  However, if the treatment provides positive value, then it generally would be welfare improving to set a lower price for the treatment for patients with disease B than disease A, so that patients with disease B would get access to the treatment.  This is an argument made by Bach (2014).

This discussion, however, treats the price of the treatment for patients with disease A as fixed.  Chandra and Garthwaite (2017) argue that with indication-specific pricing, the price charged for the treatment among patients with disease A would rise.

Cole et al. make the wise argument that what matters most is not the level of prices, but the level of societal surplus generated by said prices. They argue that there are 3 key factors not addressed by the current literature.

1. What is the level of uniform price?  If the uniform price would be very low, indication-specific price could increase prices.  If the uniform price would be high, indication-specific pricing would lower prices for some indication and expand access to patients with lower-value indications.
2. How do prices relate to value?  In countries with health technology assessment (HTA) organizations, one can insure that prices set reflect value.  While there is much debate about how well value is measured by the HTAs, Cole et al. argue that prices cannot exceed value in an HTA system since they would not be reimbursed.
3. Benefits of competition.  “A system of IBP would, in the dynamic context, create the R&D incentives required for producers to target further indications / sub-populations, thus facilitating more aggressive competition at the indication-level. We argue that, as a result, the value-based indication prices (based on setting price at the maximum WTP) should be seen as the price ‘ceilings’, and that competition can drive prices down below these levels.”

Incorporating dynamic equilibrium

Measuring price and welfare in the short-run is not the only goal for indication-specific pricing.  Part of the goal is to incentivize high-value innovation across diseases.  Thus, incorporating how indication-specific pricing would affect future R&D and drug development is important.

Economic theory suggests that there are two important dynamic effects which impact on R&D and on pricing. Firstly, with a single price, some high value or low value indications may not be developed, even though the incremental value of the drug to patients exceeds R&D and supply costs. Secondly, scientific progress stimulates R&D competition and often leads to several products coming to market in a therapy class. We propose that IBP makes it more likely (i) that competing products get developed and (ii) that competition occurs in any given indication.

Let us extend our simple example from above where a drug company is considering setting a single price or using indication specific pricing.  If the treatment was already indicated for diseae A, life sciences firms may not have an incentive to  conduct clinical trial for the treatment of patients with disease B if they knew the price would fall for all treated patients.   Or they may not produce clinical trials for disease A if they know that the eventual price will be far below the value it creates if potential future uses are limited because of a forced single price.

Conclusion

Cole et al.’s conclusion is succinct and bears repeating:

Economic theory indicates that – in the short term – indication-based pricing can improve overall welfare if it means greater patient access, but payers may (or may not) be worse off. However, the potential longer-term (dynamic) effects of IBP are sometimes neglected – optimised incentives for R&D and potential for increased price competition at the indication-level, driving down prices and delivering better value to the health system.

In short, although there are implementation challenges, indication-specific pricing is worth exploring.

Source:

• Cole, A., Towse, A., Lorgelly, P. and Sullivan, R. (2018). Economics of Innovative Payment Models Compared with Single Pricing of Pharmaceuticals. OHE Research Paper 18/04, London: Office of Health Economics.

• Bach, P. B., 2014. Indication-specific pricing for cancer drugs. JAMA, 312 (16), 1629-1630.

• Chandra, A. & Garthwaite, C., 2017. The economics of indication-based drug pricing. New England Journal of Medicine, 377 (2), 103-106.

The pros and cons of indication-specific pricing posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

What is the the “sugar code”?

Everyone knows about the Human Genome project.  The idea was to map all the genes in human (and some animal) DNA to get a better idea of the genetic factors that cause disease.  However, there are many factors beyond DNA that cause disease.  One may be the sugars in your body, also known as glycans.  In an article in The Conversation, authors Maverakis, Lebrilla and Wang write:

These long sugar chains that cover each of our cells are called glycans, and according to the National Academy of Sciences, creating a map of their location and structure will usher us into a new era of modern medicine. This is because the human glycome – the entire collection of sugars within our body – houses yet-to-be-discovered glycans with the potential to aid physicians in diagnosing and treating their patients.

Glycans are one of the four major macromolecules essential for life, with the others being DNA, proteins, and fats. The authors claim that knowing more about a patient’s glycome could help inform the root causes of auto-immune diseases (e.g., rheumatoid arthritis), food allergies, or even cancer.  For instance, aging is linked to inflammation in our glycome, but the authors do not clearly state if this relationship is causal in one direction or another (i.e., does aging cause glycome inflation, or does inflammation in the glycome from other sources increase the speed of aging), but they hvae developed an glycan theory of autoimmunity.  However, protein behavior does appear to be moderated by which glycans attach to the protein.

Diseases have found a number of ways to use the glycome to inflect humans.

…group B streptococcus, which commonly cause severe infections in babies, can avoid immune detection by impersonating human cells by carrying similar glycans as a disguise…Unfortunately some pathogens are also able to use our glycans to help them cause disease. Deadly viruses like HIV and Ebola have evolved to grab hold of specific glycans which they then “lock” onto as they infect our human cells. Therapies that either block these viruses from interacting with our glycans, or that attack virus-specific glycans may be a new avenue to treating these infections.

Thus, the authors believe that further study of the glycome, or “sugar code” can help unlock new ways to treat these diseaes.

What is the the “sugar code”? posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

The Digital Health Consumer According to Rock Health

Looking for health information online is just part of being a normal, mainstream health consumer, according to the third Rock Health Digital Health Consumer Adoption Survey published this week. By 2017, 8 in 10 U.S. adults were online health information hunters.

Six in 10 Americans looked for reviews of healthcare providers online, another new-normal consumer digital health activity.

But only one in four people had used wearable technology for health, and one in five had participated in a live video telemedicine encounter.

The Rock Health team observes that “the needle has not moved equally across every type of digital health solution.” Thus the team’s choice of title for the report: “Healthcare consumers in a digital transition.” 

Those consumers who have adopted some form of digital health tool, whether wearable tech, telehealth visit, or mobile app, seem satisfied with their experiences, which is another key aspect of the so-called “digital transition.” If user experience is positive, then consumers will sustain their use of the innovation over time — a barrier which health-focused wearables, in particularly, have encountered. In this study, one in four wearable tech owners said they no longer used the device. The reason for abandoning device use split between folks who had achieved their goal versus those who said the tech was ineffective for achieving their goal.

The top reasons consumers cited for adopting wearable tech were to be physically active (54%), to lose weight (40%), to sleep better (24%), and to manage stress (18%). Each of these use cases achieved a utility-index of over 7 points out of ten, with the Holy Grail of weight loss the lowest achiever at 7.1 — still well above an average “5.”

The Rock team examined consumer perspectives across five digital health activities and four patient segments: chronically ill seniors, the vulnerable, the worried well, and aging adults. More worried well tended to have accessed all five digital health categories: telemedicine via live ideo, digital health goal tracking, wearables, searching for online health information, and searching for provider reviews.

Looking at older people, chronically ill seniors had much lower utilization of digital health tools (except for online searching) compared with aging adults.

It’s clear that digital health adoption is much higher among younger, higher-income adults, and that vulnerable and chronically ill people lag in adoption of digital health tools.

These findings are based on Rock Health’s survey of some 4,000 U.S. adults; the poll was fielded in 2017.

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  Trust is fundamental to a consumer’s health engagement. Rock Health’s 2018 survey reinforces what we know-we know about consumers’ willingness to share health data — and that is that the physician, above all health care entities, is the patient’s most trusted data steward.

At the other end of the health data trust spectrum are government agencies and pharmaceutical companies, who rank low on consumer confidence for keeping personal health information secure.

It’s good news and bad news that physicians are so highly trusted as health data shepherds. But doctors are so burned out on EHR implementations, along with multi-tasking the management of payors and health plan types at this moment of migrating from volume-to-value. The challenge here is how health IT can be designed with the users in mind, and that means both clinicians and patients as users.

A longer-term solution would be for consumers to control their own health data in secure data lockers. There are early blockchain-enabled examples of this emerging, dotted around the world.  Check out Estonia and Switzerland for case studies on that.

In the meantime, in the U.S., our fragmented approach to health care financing and delivery inhibits scaling of digital health technologies like telehealth and remote health monitoring – but in a transition mode, as the Rock report theorizes. The adoption curve is inflecting…but not for all patients, especially the most vulnerable and chornically ill, not just yet.

The post The Digital Health Consumer According to Rock Health appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.

The Digital Health Consumer According to Rock Health posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

Your Chewing Gum Review And Guide

Today, it’s time that we talk a little smack. 

 

No, not that type—today it’s all about chewing gum. Which flavored gum is best or holds the flavor longest can be a hotly contested issue. We’ve chewed it over and we’ve decided that to get to the bottom of this sticky situation we are going to unwrap the best and worst of chewing gums. 

 

In addition to our informal research, we want to conduct a poll with our patients. Leave us a comment on our Facebook page indicating which flavor gum is your favorite—bonus points if it’s sugar free!

 

Chewing gum history  

 

There is evidence that chewing gum dates back more than 9,000 years. Originally, the substances chewed had medicinal purposes, and many were thought to relieve toothaches or quench thirst.  

 

Fast forward to the 19th century where Europeans finally began to use products that other populations from around the world had used for centuries. By 1850, this led the first industrial chewing gum factory to be opened. The original gum was made from spruce tree resin boiled down and coated with cornstarch. Unfortunately, the combination was less-than-ideal, and led subsequent producers to use paraffin wax instead of spruce tree gum. But once again, the products evolved, and chicle was substituted for paraffin wax. This combination of ingredients worked so well that it remained largely unchanged until the mid-1900s. 

 

In 1928, bubble gum made its first entrance onto the market. This product was different than other chewing gums since it was made with the primary purpose of blowing bubbles. And after more than a decade of failure, Flank Fleer finally created what we know as Double Bubble.  

 

Most popular flavors 

 

The various flavors of gum can be broken down into several main categories: minty, fruity, cinnamon, and bubble gum. The vast majority of Americans prefer mint flavored gum, with more than 72 million choosing spearmint as their top pick. 

 

Peppermint follows in popularity, in second place with 70 million, and winterfresh rounds out the top three with 53 million happy chewers. Overall, fruity flavors are enjoyed widely behind mint, with cinnamon coming in directly behind. 

 

Finally, and most surprisingly, bubble gum is the least chewed flavor among Americans. According to polls, only 22 million Americans admit to liking it the best. Due to its storied history and prevalence in pop culture and sports, many would say that it’s surprising that it falls a distant last.  

 

How long does the flavor last? 

 

After examining the data on how long the flavor of certain gums last, it’s not surprising that bubble gum is not a popular choice. Bubble tape, the gum that comes rolled up like a tape measure, has a minute and a half worth of flavor. No wonder you get so much over package! You have to get a new piece every couple of minutes just to enjoy the flavor. And bubble Yum, another favorite of bubble gum chewers, has flavor that lasts only three minutes. 

 

For minty gum lovers, the flavor times are slightly more favorable (flavorable?). Eclipse spearmint has at least six minutes’ worth of flavor, and a car pack comes with dozens of servings to keep you fresh all day. Dentyne Ice peppermint flavor packs more than five minutes of flavor in each piece. However, they claim that it will keep your mouth fresh more for than 40 minutes. This could be a clear winner if their claims are true. 

 

Finally, while Big Red is the most popular cinnamon flavored gum, its spiciness wears off after just two and a half minutes. While the initial burst of flavor can be startling, unfortunately, it wears off quickly.  

 

Dental benefits to gum chewing 

 

Dentists have long recognized the oral health benefits of chewing gum. Studies have shown that chewing sugar free gum after a meal can help rinse off harmful acids and prevent potential tooth decay. In addition, chewing gums helps to stimulate up to 10 times as much saliva in your mouth to help clear your palate or save you from dry mouth. (Dry mouth can lead to significant oral health problems since bad bacteria are able to infiltrate gum lines easier.) 

 

Finally, chewing gum helps prevent the growth of bad bacteria that causes cavities, since one of the main ingredients in gum—xylitol—causes the mouth to become inhospitable to these bacteria. It’s due to these benefits that the American Dental Association has put its seal of approval on sugar-free gums.  

 

So, if you are in a pinch after a meal and need something to freshen your breath or don’t have the opportunity to brush, popping in sugar free gum is a great option.  

The post Your Chewing Gum Review And Guide appeared first on Fort Worth Dentist | 7th Street District | H. Peter Ku, D.D.S. PA.

Your Chewing Gum Review And Guide posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

More U.S. Companies Offering Health Insurance After 8 Years of Decline

After eight years of decline, more U.S. employers offered health insurance to workers in 2017, EBRI reports in its latest Issue Brief.

In 2017, 46.9% of U.S. companies offered health insurance to their employees, up by 1.6 percentage points from a low of 45.3% in 2016.

For perspective, ten years earlier in 2008, 56.4% of employers offered health insurance, shown in the first bar chart (Figure 1 from the EBRI report).

The largest percentage point increase in health plan offer-rates came from the smallest companies, those with less than 10 employees: while 21.7% of those companies offered health insurance in 2016, 23.5% did so in 2017. This calculates to an increase of 8.3% of employers offering insurance to workers.

Offer rates among other size firms stayed relatively flat or slightly declined between 2016 and 2017.

Looking back to 2015, health insurance offer rates increased across all firm sizes except for the largest firms with 1,000 or more employees, which stayed relatively flat over the two years at 99.4% and 99.3%.

Unemployment in the U.S. has declined, year over year, since the height of the Great Recession in 2009. By 2017, the second chart (Figure 6 from the report) shows unemployment at a low point of 4.1% by the end of 2017. “When unemployment is low,” Paul Fronstin of EBRI writes, “recruiting and retaining workers becomes a bigger challenge for employers, including some smaller employers, which in turn often means improving compensation and benefits.”

Employers have generally shifted more healthcare financial risk onto employees in the form of greater emphasis on consumer-directed health plans: high-deductible insurance coupled with health savings accounts, along with more attention to wellness and population health management programs — “supporting greater consumer engagement in health care,” the report notes.

In the conclusion of the report, EBRI calls out the wild card in this story: will U.S. employers continue to offer health insurance in the future? The answer to that question lies in public policy, specifically whether tax treatment will change for companies offering health insurance (e.g., ERISA), so-called “Cadillac Plan” treatment taxing high-cost health insurance, and whether health care costs can continue to be borne, in part, by employers in light of  global business competition from countries that cover health insurance as a public good.

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  Workers’ real wages have declined in the past year, owing to higher oil prices (translating at the gas tank) which off-set any modest increases in income Americans might have seen in their paychecks from the 2018 tax cut bill.

Wages grew 2.7% in the 12 months August 2017-July 2018. The tax cut was expected to save $930 for families earning between $48,600 and $86,100 this year, a Brookings-Urban Institute analysis calculated.

Gas price hikes have eaten into any gains average consumers may have enjoyed from the tax cut, amounting to about $30 a month in marginally more fuel costs. As an analyst writing for The Street observed, “In the Trump economy, it’s one step forward, one step back.”

In the meantime, one-half of healthcare executives told Venrock in a recent survey that the most important healthcare event of the past year wasn’t the Amazon-Berkshire Hathaway-JP Morgan partnership or the CVS/Aetna merger deal — it was the survival of the Affordable Care Act.

Both business leaders and consumers alike know that the U.S. healthcare economy is integrated into the nation’s overall macro-economy — and Americans’ kitchen table economics.

For some historical perspective, the topic of Gas ‘n Health Care was the topic of my inaugural Health Populi post exactly eleven years ago Labor Day week 2017.

The post More U.S. Companies Offering Health Insurance After 8 Years of Decline appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.

More U.S. Companies Offering Health Insurance After 8 Years of Decline posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

Links

Some interesting reads to start off your week:

• Contracting and in-network providers.
• Cancer data sharing.
• Is one answer good enough for all?
• Parrot economics.
• Free medical school tuition at NYU.

Links posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

Multimorbidity In the US – Obesity As A Key Driver of Health Spending

In the U.S., the growing prevalence of multi-morbidity is contributing to increased mortality and healthcare cost growth in America. Underlying this clinical and economic phenomenon is obesity, which primary care doctors are challenged to deal with as a chronic condition along with typically co-occurring comorbidities of hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia.

The line chart come from a new study into Multimorbidity Trends in United States Adults, 1988-2014, published in the July-August 2018 issue of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.

The authors, affiliated with the West Virginia University Department of Family Medicine, call out that obesity (the pink-red line) experienced the largest increased trend of any condition included in this study’s timeframe.

“Obesity is associated with a large number of pathologic processes and risks, including metabolic syndrome, vascular disease, cancer, oxidative stress, inflammation, as well as many others.”

The authors recommend that public health leaders and policy makers address the obesity trend when designing “policies and interventions to improve the public’s health.”

Unless this trajectory reverses, multimorbidity trends will continue to drive up healthcare costs in the U.S.

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  I note that the authors of this study are based at the West Virginia University Department of Family Medicine. I’ve frequently looked at West Virginia here in Health Populi and elsewhere as a state that bears a heavy public health burden based on a range of risk factors: smoking, health care service access and insurance coverage (with 29% of the state’s citizens covered by Medicaid, the highest share of a U.S. state’s population enrolled in the plan), and, yes, obesity.

The 2017 Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index found West Virginia ranked last of the 50 states in terms of citizen health. The Index is based on five measures: physical, financial, social, purpose, and community. West Virginia’s overall score was heavily weighted against the physical and financial compared with other states.

Decades of research have shown that nutrition, economic stability, and a clean and safe physical environment make individual and public health. In the United States, however, there’s been under-investment in these social determinants that closely tie to health. Why has this been the case? Because they are public goods, and the U.S. hasn’t looked through that macro-lens on health policy for some time, discussed in Social Determinants As Public Goods: A New Approach To Financing Key Investments in Healthy Communities, published in the August 2018 issue of Health Affairs.

The American obesity challenge calls for a multi-pronged, multi-sectoral approach to nutrition, physical activity, transportation and town planning, and of course, healthcare service access. A JAMA article, Potential Policy Approaches to Address Diet-Related Diseases, speaks to a broad range of food-specific strategies including taxing sugar, regulating sodium in processed foods, labeling, educating and promoting healthy eating styles, and increasing subsidies to low-income people for the purchase of healthy foods.

This last tactic, of nudging consumers through behavioral economics, to change eating styles, is no easy feat. Food is baked, literally, into our home cultures: it’s emotional, historical, traditional, ritual, deeply personal. Couple that life-flow with a person’s external environment which may be challenged by both food deserts and food swamps — the former, lack of local healthy food options, and the latter, a preponderance of poor, unhealthy food choices.

These complexities call for America to work across policy silos and industry sectors to address the health-economic challenge of obesity. It’s about way more than food access, coupons, and well-intended nutrition education programs. We need all hands on deck: in the kitchen, grocery stores and retailers, schools, doctors’ offices, and government agencies.

The post Multimorbidity In the US – Obesity As A Key Driver of Health Spending appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.

Multimorbidity In the US – Obesity As A Key Driver of Health Spending posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

The IVI-NSCLC is coming

The Innovation and Value Initiative today announced that it is in the process of releasing a new model and value tool to evaluate treatments for for EGFR-positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).  More details on the model (named the IVI-NSCLC model) are available here, which includes a study protocol and model timeline.

Oncology is an area of immense clinical need and a primary driver of healthcare spending, making it a prime target for assessment of the value of available medical interventions. IVI’s next Open-Source Value Project (OSVP) model will focus on non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Specifically, the IVI-NSCLC model will focus on sequential treatment strategies for patients with epidermal growth factor receptor positive (EGFR+) NSCLC.

IVI’s open-source value model for EGFR+ NSCLC treatments will facilitate patient-centered, robust, and relevant evaluation of the value of care for an often devastating disease. Development of this model reflects IVI’s vision of a transparent process for understanding value in the local setting, especially from the patient perspective.

The full model and value tool are due out to the public November 29 according to the IVI-NSCLC timeline.

The IVI-NSCLC is coming posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

The Waning Days of Summer Health Wonk Review

Julie Ferguson has posted the “The Waning Days of Summer” edition of this month’s Health Wonk Review at Workers’ Comp Insider.  Check it out!

The Waning Days of Summer Health Wonk Review posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

ACOs: Improving quality of care or reducing competition?

Accountable Care Organizations aim to improve quality and reduce cost through an integrated care model.  The theory is that by coordianting care better across different provider specialties and care settings, patients care improves.   In order to coordinate care, however, you need data.  In order for payers to provide higher reimbursement to high quality/low cost ACOs, you also need data.  For instance, let us say I want to evaluate the quality and cost of a patient in my ACO.  I would data on cost and quality not only from my ACO but also from any other providers that the patient visited as ACOs are typicaly responsible for overall cost and quality, even if patients are seen outside their ACO network.

To address this issue, ACOs within the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) get access to a patient’s claims information even if they are treated by another ACO or non-ACO provider.  On the one hand, this information is helpful for coordinating care; on the other, these data offer providers a competitive advantage as they can view what their competitors are charging and which patients are visiting their facilities.  This issue is well known.

Broome et al. (2018) calls these more strategic firms “ACO squatters”:

CMS believe…that risk-taking ACOs are more likely to make greater investments in reducing costs. CMS is also concerned that some ACOs that do not take on risk may not be focused on reducing costs at all. These “ACO squatters,” as we have referred to them in the past, use the waivers and data available in MSSP not to provide better care at lower cost but to consolidate a healthcare market.

What is CMS doing about this?  Well, first of all they are transferring more risk to ACOs.  They reduced the maximum amount of time allowed in 1-sided risk framework (bonuses only) from 6 years to 2 years for new ACOs, before they transition to two-sided risk (both potential bonuses and penalties).  By year 3, 2% of an ACOs revenue would be at risk, increasing to 4% in year 4 and 8% in year 5 and beyond.

Second, they are building in some flexibility.  For instance ACOs will be able to identify beneficiaries prospectively (based on who they think are their patients) and retrospectively (based on who actually were their patients during the prior year).

Third, CMS is comparing ACO cost savings not only compared to national trends but relative to a blended rate of national and regional trends.  For rural areas with few ACOs or even few providers, this could be problematic since reducing cost could also reduce your benchmark if there are few other providers.  My previous research addressed this issue for the Medicare Wage Index calculation and CMS could apply a similar solution for regional benchmarking of ACO costs.

ACOs: Improving quality of care or reducing competition? posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

Could a Netflix model solve big health care problems?

That is what is proposed by Dana Goldman in his article in The Hill.  He uses the case of Louisiana’s approach to pay for treatments for the hepatitis C virus (HCV) to make the point.

The [Louisiana] Department of Health is working on a new strategy to expand access—one that involves a licensing deal. The state would agree to pay a drug company for medication for several years in exchange for unlimited access to treatment.

This is the Netflix model applied to health care, and it makes a lot of sense. Pharmaceuticals have high R&D costs but often low manufacturing costs, much like software. But the current pricing models couldn’t be more different. Netflix content is essentially purchased through a monthly license. They do not charge a fee every time we view a show. The idea is to reward the content creator, but not limit our ability to watch since marginal costs are low.

My colleagues and I have shown that such subscription models can improve outcomes and save money at the same time.

The Netflix model matches will with pharmaceutical cost structure: namely low marginal costs, but high R&D costs.  The key issue, of course, is what price should Louisiana pay for the HCV treatments that (i) will generate social surplus for its residents, and (ii) will compensate life sciences firms for their drug development cost.

Do read the whole article.

Could a Netflix model solve big health care problems? posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

Disruption Is Healthcare’s New Normal

Googling the words “disruption” and “healthcare” today yielded 33.8 million responses, starting with “Riding the Disruption Wave in Healthcare” from Bain in Forbes, Accenture’s essay on “Big Bang Disruption in Healthcare,” and, “A Cry for Encouraging Disruption” in the New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst. This last article responded to the question, “Can we successfully deliver better quality care for patients at a lower cost?” asked by François de Brantes, Executive Director of the Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute.

“Disruption” as a noun and an elephant in our room has been with us in healthcare since the September/October 2000 issue of Harvard Business Review. In that issue, Clay Christensen and colleagues published their seminal article, Will Disruptive Innovations Cure Healthcare? This emerged out of Christensen’s 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. Since then, U.S. health care industry wonks (including me) have used the “d” word in conversation, presentation, and prognostication.

But it took some years to get “here,” to this point in American healthcare’s moment of exorbitant spending, inefficiency, burnt-out clinicians, and universal frustration across industry stakeholders, for me to say that disruption is not a point sitting on Gartner’s Hype Cycle: disruption is now the new normal in American healthcare.

Just this week, JAMA features a Viewpoint column titled, How Disruptive Innovation by Business and Technology Firms Could Improve Population Health. And, a new survey from Reaction Data on the future of the healthcare market focuses on the theme of “healthcare disruption.”

This isn’t just a word that we’ve been waiting to “happen.” This is happening, and as the founder of Institute for the Future, Roy Amara first coined: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

Dr. Anne Stey and her UCSF colleagues write in JAMA, “The entrance of the business and technology sector in the health care market creates an opportunity because of the accessible platforms, analytics, and marketing expertise that many of these companies already have in place.”

Now, turn to the Reaction Data study’s chart on which technologies will have the biggest impact. Note that respondents to this study were mostly C-level executives working in hospitals. They said that the technologies that would have the largest disruptive impact would be telemedicine, artificial intelligence, interoperability, and data analytics. These are some of the very things Dr. Stey’s article on disruption cite.

Which new entrant would likely have the greatest impact? Reaction Data asked.

That would be Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, followed by IBM, Walmart and Salesforce, the second chart from Reaction Data shows you.

This finding confirms what we’ve been saying here on Health Populi for a while…my Institute for the Future mentors taught me well (thank you Ian, Wendy, Robert, Mary and Matthew. et. al.). Here’s more on Amazon, on Apple, on Google, and Microsoft, if you care to dig in to each of these more.

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  So exactly 20 years after Christensen wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma, he gave a seminar on how disruptive innovation can finally revolutionize healthcare. “Finally,” after 20 years….which is why I continue to keep Amara’s Law front-of mind when it comes to healthcare’s ability to change.

Dr. Stey’s Viewpoint recognizes that the drive real change in healthcare that impacts peoples’ health, it’s  critically important to connect healthcare providers to the new-new innovations. Consumers-patients highly trust their doctors, their nurses, their pharmacists, above all professions in the U.S. Making those connections via telehealth and virtual health technology, from a pure technical standpoint, is do-able today.

The larger challenge, Stey and friends point out, is access: too many patients lack either insurance or other convenient on-ramps to primary care. Empowering individuals with access to their own health records – that is, their own data — could help make these connections, and make them stick. That’s not a panacea and won’t solve the larger access challenge, but will help.

In the past few days, we see that Amazon has hired a star cardiologist to join the company’s healthcare efforts; Walmart will work with Anthem, the health insurance group, to expand access to over-the-counter medicines; Best Buy is buying GreatCall to expand retail health to older people; and Capsule, a digital pharmacy, raised $50 million more in funding to try and scale nationally….among other pretty big stories that fall into the “disruptive” category.

Not every one of these efforts will stick or scale…but they aren’t pilots or mini-experiments for fast-failure, either. We have entered the chaos-and-creation phase of healthcare disruption. Let’s buckle in, lean in, learn together, and drive that Quadruple Aim to make healthcare better, cheaper, accessible, for all. To paraphrase the wise François de Brantes of HCCI, we must deliver better quality care for all patients at a lower cost.

The post Disruption Is Healthcare’s New Normal appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.

Disruption Is Healthcare’s New Normal posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

What should be covered by government vs. private insurance?

How are public and private insurance used in the real-world?  The answer to this question varies across countries, however, there are generally 3 ways in which public and private health insurance systems interact.

First, private insurance may substitute for public insurance. That is, people are either covered privately or publicly. This is the case in Australia, Ireland, Spain and used to be the case in the Netherlands before 2006…Second, private insurance is bought in addition to public insurance to get faster access (i.e. shorter waiting lists), have a broader choice of providers and treatments for a given condition. Examples include Austria, Denmark and Finland…Third, private insurance is bought to cover treatment for conditions that are not covered by public insurance.  One can think of dental care, physiotherapy and prescription glasses that are not covered by the public insurance system. But also, the public system may not fully cover the costs of a treatment and people can insure the public co-payment on the private market. Example shere include the Netherlands (after 2006), France and Luxembourg.

In the U.S. the interaction typically occurs along dimensions #1 and #3.  Working age individuals may be covered by private insurance (often through their employer) or by a government program such as Medicaid.   For the elderly, they are generally covered by they publicly-funded Medicare program.  Medicare, however, often requires beneficiaries to make large co-payments.  Private Medigap insurance, however, covers many of these copayments.

A recent paper by Boone et al. (2018) notes two commonly cited market imperfections that would justify government provided health insurance but then also adds a third.  Namely, there is the issue of adverse selection.  In the private market, the sickest individuals may have trouble buying insurance if healthy individuals drop out of the market (even though they themselves would prefer insurance if provided at rates reasonable to their risk).  If there is public insurance where everyone gets insurance, this solves the adverse selection issue.  The second market imperfection–moral hazard–affects both public and private insurance.  When insurance is provided, people will be more likely to request expensive medicines than are needed since they are not bearing the full cost of the medication.  A third and final market imperfection is liquidity constraints.  In many economic models, there is a high demand for insurance because patients are risk averse.  It could be the case, however, that individuals may not have access to sufficient capital to fund the purchase of a treatment that they value highly.  Financial institutions may be wary of lending large sums to individuals with very serious disease.

In a standard model with adverse selection and moral hazard (but no liquidity constraints), other studies have found that government insurance should cover treatments likely to induce adverse selection and that cost-effectiveness does not influence whether government or private sector should cover a treatment.

In the Boone model with liquidity constraints, however, the results change along five dimensions.

First, CE scores do play a role in prioritizing which treatments should be insured. Because of limited budgets, money should be spent on treatments with a high health return per euro spent.Second, treatments with serious moral hazard issues should not be covered at all by (any) insurance. Third, relatively cheap treatments should not be covered by either basic or supplementary insurance. Fourth, basic insurance should cover treatments that are predominantly used by people who at the margin buy the most valuable treatments. The importance of disease (and treatment) prevalence to determine which treatments should be covered by basic insurance appears to be new. We derive sufficient conditions under which basic insurance should target treatments used especially by vulnerable people with high risk and low income. Finally, the welfare effects of government intervention in health insurance are magnitudes higher in an access to care model.

The paper is interesting and the key issue is to what extent are liquidity constraints binding in the real world.  Some have called for health mortgages to allow liquidity constrained individuals to afford expensive treatments.  Other individuals can receive loans from family or friends to afford needed treatments.   However, with the cost of some novel treatments reaching six figures in cost per year, liquidity constraints are clearly an issue for many individuals.

Source:

• Boone, Jan. “Basic versus supplementary health insurance: access to care and the role of cost effectiveness.” Journal of health economics (2018).

 

What should be covered by government vs. private insurance? posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

A Service You Should Know About

Did you know that at Dr. Ku’s office we offer sedation dentistry? As practitioners and patients ourselves, we understand that going to the dentist can cause anxiety. Up to 40 million Americans admit NOT going to the dentist solely due to that hurdle. 

 

Unfortunately, the real fear is that by skipping your bi-annual appointment, you are actually setting yourself up for more expensive and extensive dental work in the future. As though that didn’t add insult to injury!  

 

For some patients, the fear stems from appointments when they were children, or from a single traumatic visit. For others, it is a generalized anxiety that makes visiting the dentist untenable.  

 

Through the practice of sedation dentistry, Dr. Ku is able to remove anxiety completely from the picture and leave you confident and secure about future visits. To ensure everyone feels comfortable in our office—no matter the level of anxiety—Dr. Ku finds sedation dentistry an important component of his practice. 

 

What is sedation dentistry? 

 

To those with dental anxiety, sedition dentistry can sound almost as frightening as the dental work itself. Are you completely out of it while under the anesthesia? Can you talk? Will you feel pain? Nausea? 

 

The good news is that our patients regularly rave about this service. Even our most nervous patients leave feeling confident and even proud of their accomplishment—and even better about their clean teeth! 

 

There are several types of sedition dentistry, however they all work with the brain and nervous system to reduce fear and anxiety—while many times blocking out any memories of the event. Those patients who do remember the appointment report feeling a sense of deep relaxation throughout. The most common forms of sedation used are: 

 

• Inhaled minimum sedation: If you’re looking just to “take the edge off,” this nitrous oxide (popularly known as laughing gas) concoction will do the trick. Patients report feeling relaxed throughout every procedure. Since this sedation wears off quickly, patients are able to drive themselves home after the appointment, too. 

 

• Oral sedation: Depending on the dosage, oral sedation can range from minimal to moderate. Oral sedation is administered through a pill—typically one found in the same family as Valium. Patients will take the pill about an hour before their procedures. While patients may feel drowsy, they generally remain awake throughout the appointment. However, if you would like to take a quick nap after taking oral sedation, that’s fine with us! The higher the dose, the more likely the patient is to fall asleep. Dosage will be discussed with your dentist prior to your appointment.  

 

• IV moderate sedation: IV sedation is administered through the veins and can be controlled by the dentist throughout the procedure. Patients who receive IV sedation are normally visiting the office for more complex procedures that take more time than your typical cleaning. Since this is the most invasive sedation, it is extra important to discuss your full medical history with your dentist.  

 

What are the benefits? 

 

In order to combat tooth decay and gum disease, or identify even larger issues such as oral cancers, patients must be willing to come to the office and sit in the chair. If fear is what is stopping them, then it’s important to eliminate or otherwise subdue that fear. 

 

Sedation dentistry allows for us to do that. We believe that working with each of our patients and meeting them “where are they are mentally” allows us to form a long-lasting bond that builds an essential trust. 

 

In addition to relieving fears, sedation dentistry also allows us to complete several procedures in one visit. This minimizes the number of times patients have to come in and allows us to provide the best care possible. If you have anxiety or fears about visiting the dentist, then call us today. We would be happy to walk you through what our office can offer.

The post A Service You Should Know About appeared first on Fort Worth Dentist | 7th Street District | H. Peter Ku, D.D.S. PA.

A Service You Should Know About posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

Re-insurance in Commercial vs. Medicare Part D markets

Re-insurance is used to help insurers the cost of unpredictable, high cost events.  Government re-insurance likely had a beneficial effect of attracting new firms to the market when Part D was rolled out in 2006.  However, to what extent is re-insurance important for the Part D market compared to in the commercial market. A paper by Frakt and Miller (2018) cites some statistics.

…in commercial insurance markets, about 1 percent of policyholders reach a catastrophic level of expenditures at which reinsurance kicks in, and reinsurance costs account for 10 percent of spending (Milliman 2015). But in Part D, about 8 percent of enrollees (and growing) trigger reinsurance payments, which accounted for about one-third of the nearly $100B combined enrollee and government spending through Part D in 2016.

While Part D re-insurance is certainly broader than in commercial markets, this should not be entirely surprising as Part D insures many elderly individual with multiple comorbidities who may be at risk for catastrophic costs in any given year. Frakt and Miller recommend lowering government reinsurance.  On the one hand, this approach would reduce government expenditures and shift more risk to private insurers.  At the same time, this recommendation would also increase the premiums that beneficiaries pay and could reduce the number of firms entering the market and the number of plans available on the market from which patients can choose.  In short, there are some clear trade-offs to consider in this proposal.

Re-insurance in Commercial vs. Medicare Part D markets posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

Friday Links

• Do most employees with HDHP have employer funded HSAs?
• Are cardiovascular drugs providing high value?
• Cash transfers→ better health?
• “We need to be innovative with our care as long as we fervently believe we can do it safely,”
• Raj of the NHS.

Friday Links posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

5 Places In Fort Worth That Are Much Scarier Than The Dentist

You never thought that was possible, right? Well, we can assure you, there are more frightening sights in town. 

 

If you think going to the dentist is like something straight out of a thriller, you need to visit one of these places to see what freaks US out at Dr. Ku’s office. As it turns out, Fort Worth is a pretty shriek-worthy place!  

1. Hangman’s House of Horrors 

 

This survival-based escape room that will shake you a little. The story has it that this was a 100-year-old government building that was active during the First World War. The building also has the Zombie Outbreak and the No Place Like Home room. Not sure what balance of adventure and fright you’re looking for? Let Dr. Ku pick, and then you’ll really have something to be nervous about! 

 

You’ll find Hangman’s House at 4400 Blue Mound Road, Fort Worth. Do you dare? 

 

 2. Moxley Manor Haunted Attraction 

 

Enter here to sweat out your deepest fears. Fort Worth has something for everybody, especially for those with a need to up the “Aah!” factor.  

 

The Moxley Manor is based on actual events here in town…about a hundred years ago. The story has it that there was a family living in this manor in the 1920s, and then…well, we’ll let you discover what happened next. Check out their Facebook page here and hope for a story-worthy experience.  

 

 3. Fort Worth ZOO 

 

This might be the last place you expected ghosts, but locals say they often see the ghost of animal trainer Michael A. Bell who was crushed to death by one of the zoo elephants in 1987. The zoo also has a nice calendar of events of the wilder sort, from “Predator” to “Monkey Business,” so be sure you pay them a visit. 

 

4. Six Flags over Texas 

 

Make the trip to Arlington for a jam-packed day filled with adrenaline. And, wouldn’t you know it? There’s a spook factor, too…it’s not just the rides that will get your heart pumping. 

There have been a sum of minor events reported in recent decades, like the story of a girl named Annie whose phantom has been spotted near the Candy Store and the Texas Giant. There’s also the infamous ghost of an old man dressed in overalls guarding over the stage in The Palace…think you can handle it? 

 

5. Thistle Hill 

 

Also known as the most haunted building in Fort Worth, this mansion is more than a hundred years old and currently hosts different social events, but you can also sign up for a simple tour. Just watch out—they say that in 1970 a major renovation to this historical mansion disturbed some resting spirits. 

 

There are reports of a lady in white and a gentleman with a moustache wearing a tennis outfit welcoming those who enter the house. And yet, Thistle Hill is known for its use for stylish dinners and parties. Perhaps the ghosts help host and greet guests? 

 

We promise that Dr. Ku’s office isn’t haunted, so if your fear of ghosts is greater than your fear of the dentist chair, this could be your mental trick to get in for your regular appointments. We look forward to seeing you next time and swapping stories about these frightening Fort Worth treasures!  

The post 5 Places In Fort Worth That Are Much Scarier Than The Dentist appeared first on Fort Worth Dentist | 7th Street District | H. Peter Ku, D.D.S. PA.

5 Places In Fort Worth That Are Much Scarier Than The Dentist posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

Best Buy Bets on AgingTech in the Expanding Retail Health Ecosystem

With the acquisition of GreatCall, a mature player in the aging-tech space, Best Buy is doubling down on consumer health technology@retail.

This week at Best Buy. the electronics retailer,  it’s out with CDs and in with technology for aging at home. The company announced that it would buy GreatCall for $800 million.

A snippet from the announcement from Best Buy’s press release is shown in the first diagram, noting that GreatCall’s membership is approaching 1 million subscribers who use mobile phones and connected devices, “providing peace of mind to their loved ones.”

Beyond the obvious “falling and I can’t get up” pronouncements via media coverage in USA Today and other mass news outlets, Best Buy’s purchase of GreatCall signals the electronics chain’s commitment to be a relevant player in retail health — in this case, to address the needs of people who want to age safely and well at home through the Jitterbug phone and Lively wearable devices.

Best Buy has survived a phase in retail where competitors, like Circuit City, Radio Shack, and HH Gregg  have failed. Even with Amazon-everything, and in health/care, too, Best Buy has successfully navigated the rough retail waters to get to this point. Throughout the past decade, in fact, Best Buy has been a major channel for wearable health devices competing with Amazon, Target and Walmart, among other stores both bricks-and-mortar and ecommerce.

With GreatCall, Best Buy consolidates a role at the convergence of Internet of Healthy Things (thank you, Dr. Joe Kvedar), smart and connected homes, wearable tech, and self-care.

The company’s corporate vision, Best Buy 2020: Building the New Blue, identified the aging population as a growth market of 50 million Americans 65 years of age and older, expanding over 50% over the next two decades.

“We have a great opportunity to serve the needs of these customers by combining GreatCall’s expertise with Best Buy’s unique merchandising, marketing, sales and services capabilities,” CEO Hubert Joly was quoted in the press release on the deal.

Interestingly, Best Buy was GreatCall’s first retail partner, a relationship struck up ten years ago.

“Feel safe, connected, and confident,” Best Buy’s online site focusing on healthy aging communicates on the launch page for aging tech featuring links to GreatCall products and others. From here, consumers can explore health and wellness wearables, hearables, and other connected devices explicitly targeting an older, empowered consumer and caregiver. Note the AARP link-up at the bottom of that page, further branding the value proposition for people over 50 — AARP’s target market.

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  Best Buy ranks top of the list of top 100 consumer electronics retailers as tallied by TWICE, a leading publication on the consumer electronics industry who partners with CTA (the Consumer Technology Association, operator of the annual CES conference).

We’ve observed and covered the go-go growth of digital health devices, smart homes, and aging tech at CES over the past decade. With the comings-and-goings, rises-and-failings of both suppliers and retailers, two personae have persisted over the years: Best Buy and aging consumers and their caregivers.

While Amazon, Walmart, Apple, et. al., will continue to grow in healthcare, it’s exciting to see Best Buy making a bet in this way. We’ve seen Danone do the same in Big Food for health and nutrition, and Philips focusing on digital health, too. I place Best Buy in this ecosystem of companies who are serious about doing well and doing good for health citizens. Of course, we continue to watch and advise this space, always with the objective of helping make healthcare better for consumers who make health where they live, work, play, pray, learn…and shop.

The post Best Buy Bets on AgingTech in the Expanding Retail Health Ecosystem appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.

Best Buy Bets on AgingTech in the Expanding Retail Health Ecosystem posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com