The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference 2016 will arguably rank as the largest business of healthcare conference scheduled anywhere in the world this year. Although there have already been numerous reviews and takeaways regarding the conference, I’d like to share with you the top three topics absent from this year's conference.
- What is the most needed that we didn’t find? The answer is still in the EMR. All the data in the world doesn’t mean a thing if it cannot have a direct impact on patient outcomes.
Synchronization of, and access to, clinical data, including lab results, is what is most needed to improve healthcare alignment. Every day our team of pharmacists and MTM experts claws for critical patient lab data that currently resides with providers in order to evaluate the medication therapies we manage. It is a process that needs an elegant solution or product to come to market quickly.
- Value and pharma’s day at-risk: mostly crickets. Last November, there was much talk on pharma’s at-risk day that would come as a result of the PCSK9 inhibitor, Repatha. We believed this idea of pay-for-performance drug would start a new trend.
Just this week, Tracey Stanton, FiercePharma, also reported on pay-for-performance cancer drugs in Italy, where the country’s “medicine regulator had full-refund deals on more than 90 drugs” [at the end of 2014]. Yet at J.P. Morgan 2016, there were no announcements of new, similar deals.
- As usual, the patient was largely absent. Or were they? One opportunity the organizers should create for 2017. It’s no surprise that at a business of healthcare conference, the focus was not on improving patient access or patient outcomes. In the future, I think integrating the patient in future J.P. Morgan Healthcare conferences would be well received by speakers, panelists and audience members.
I think many of the J.P. Morgan conference attendees (and even analysts) may like to see more anecdotal proof of the impact the various healthcare companies, and their products and services, have on the improvement of patient outcomes in addition to their financial improvement. We are all stakeholders in healthcare and we should be able to achieve both.
To read Curant COO Marc O’Connor’s complete article, visit MedCity News.