Panel: Greater adoption of IT, new advancements needed for improved care

BOSTON—Advancements in healthcare have allowed the average lifespan to reach approximately 80 years, but longer lives mean receiving more and spending more for healthcare. While modern advancements in healthcare, whether in the realm of health IT or pharmaceuticals, may have the ability to reduce these costs, establishing their use in practice can be difficult. A panel of healthcare professionals gathered at the 2012 Harvard Business School Conference on Feb. 4 to discuss this dilemma.

“In 1900, healthcare costs were immeasurably low and lifespans at birth were thought to be around 40. Now, lifespans are around 80 years and healthcare costs are 15 to 20 percent of our gross domestic product,” said moderator Stan Lapidus, president and CEO of SynapDx, a laboratory services company in Southborough, Mass.

Individual panel members from the private sector, who Lapidus said were all “grappling with the consequences of living for 80 years,” discussed some of the obstacles their companies have faced trying to introduce new products to the healthcare market and how they've gotten around them.

Each panel member expressed a degree of frustration with regulatory structure that makes achieving approval a time-consuming and costly process, which Lapidus pointed out is partly because outcomes for treatments of diseases like Alzheimer’s aren’t evident until years after an intervention begins.

“If it takes you 10 years to study something and prove that it actually works, then what about all those patients that could have benefited over that 10-year period of time,” said Wei-Li Shao, the director of the Alzheimer’s unit for pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly.

Part of the problem is that new medications and devices are being developed more quickly than the policies to regulate them. Although referring to payors’ policies and not government regulators, Richard J. Schatzberg, president and CEO of Generation Health, said, “What seems like a reasonable policy today could be obsolete in a week based on a new data.”

The genetics benefit manager company in Upper Saddle River, N.J., works with payors to “understand what they’ve been reimbursing, benchmark it against what others are paying and then look at their medical policies.”

Regulations in the U.S. often lead companies to decide to market their products overseas instead, according to Medtronic Senior Vice President Katie Szyman, which can result in medical tourism. While frustrated with the circumstances, Szyman, of the Minneapolis-based health IT vendor, provided simple advice. “Focus on the technologies and therapies that will reduce the cost of care and improve outcomes,” she said. “If you keep that your focus, then you end up with winning products.”