Activity on innovation front might not 'equal the achievement'

BOSTON—The current healthcare environment is a “perfect storm of opportunity,” but the activity might not equal the achievement, said Sachin Jain, MD, MBA, vice president and chief medical information and innovation officer officer for Merck. Jain spoke during the Medical Informatics World Congress on April 28.

Thanks to Obamacare, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation and other initiatives in healthcare, it’s a good time to be an innovator, Jain said. All kinds of new voices, a clear recognition of the issues and people starting to operate from a common framework of issues are all helping, but Jain said he holds “a high level of skepticism. I worry that this is a moment that could easily get lost because we’re not concerned about documenting whether what we’re doing is making a difference.” Healthcare should be approaching this time with the same rigor it would with new drug so it can “take advantage of this hard-fought special moment.”

Health IT is changing the drug development industry, he said. “We need to develop a strategy because we don’t necessarily have what we need. There is more data outside our walls than inside.” Customers know more about the efficacy of certain medications than Merck does, he said.

In response, Merck developed a new initiative that focuses on three core pillars: big data, clinical decision support and patient-facing health IT.

Big data is the “bread-and-butter,” he said, because “you can’t pay for value unless you understand the real-world value [of a medication].” Merck is building collaborations with informatics organizations to “bring our people closer to cutting-edge informatics.”

Clinical decision support is important to Merck because “we develop new drugs and guidelines for their use and then look at what’s actually happening and see we’re 15 to 20 years behind. There are huge lags between development and use in the real world.”

Merck is focusing on patient-facing health IT to find out whether the company can do a better job of incorporating the patient voice, Jain said. “We often think of ourselves as patients but we’re not necessarily capturing people’s needs. That’s an important first step of trying to understand unmet medical needs.”

Jain compared the drug development business to songwriting. “We’re trying to write hits. How we deliver those hits matters and is increasingly important as we recognize gaps in translation.”