Archive | March, 2014

The Case For Beyond The Pill Strategies In Pharma

March 24, 2014 by George Van Antwerp 3 Comments

You’ll hear this buzzword – “beyond the pill” – come up every once in a while in a discussion with a pharmaceutical manufacturer.  As the drug pipeline has dried up and generics have become the norm for oral solid medications, the question is how do these behemoth companies “pivot” to leverage their massive global footprints, their feet on the street, their deep disease specific insights, and their medications. 

“In population health, what once drove revenue becomes a source of cost. If products, services, and therapeutics don’t lower costs, meaningfully improve outcomes, and help better patient experience, population health managers simply won’t use them.” Jerry Cacciotti, Partner, Health & Life Sciences, Oliver Wyman (source)

I’m a big believer in this strategy.  Imagine what they could do in terms of services to wrap around obesity drugs.  Imagine how they could support patients with diabetes or with cancer.  While the short-term view is that these actions might help differentiate them from a formulary or specialty pharmacy perspective, I would argue that they might actually come out with new business models like Merck is doing with Vree Health.

Ultimately, it all begins with an understanding of several issues from the outside-in:

  • What is the patient journey?
    • How do they experience the healthcare system? (e.g., clinics, MDs, pharmacists, family)
    • How or what influences their experience? (e.g., Dr. Google)
    • How do their experiences change over time? (e.g., newly diagnosed versus chronically sick)
    • Which experiences do they remember? (or as one of my clients call it – the Golden Moments)
  • What does the patient really want or need?  (think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs)
  • Where is the patient (especially from a digital perspective)?
  • What are the patient’s expectations for you (pharma) or another entity?
    • How do they feel about you?
    • Do they trust you?
  • How do the other constituents in the care team interact with you?  With the patient?
  • How do you create a culture of empowerment, consumer focus, and transparency to really understand the needs of different constituents, react to them internally, and embrace issues dynamically?

In this consumer experience space, I often look to Bruce Temkin’s work and research.  He does a great job at a cross-industry perspective.  In healthcare, I’ve been very motivated by the work of Ingrid Lindbergh who was at Cigna and then moved to Prime Therapeutics.  She’s my role model for what I want to do in a large healthcare company. 

Two things got me thinking about this topic.  First, I was struck this weekend that there was research showing that people who struggle to buy food for their families are non-adherent.  I really hope that anyone in this field wasn’t surprised by that fact.  Of course, the struggle is that everyone working in the field is often constrained by their view of the world which often doesn’t include much experience with poverty. 

Second, I was sent a new research piece by Accenture called “Great Expectations: Why Pharma Companies Can’t Ignore Patient Services”.  It made me think about Dennis Urbaniak’s move from Sanofi where he was leading a lot of innovation to a Managing Director at Accenture.  Perhaps, he will bring some of this type of innovative thinking to more pharma companies. 

Here’s two infographics from the Accenture report which I think help hammer home the point of why beyond the pill is necessary:

Image

Image

Healthcare
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International Differences In Wellness Programs

March 20, 2014 by George Van Antwerp 0 Comments

I was looking for a statistic today on wellness programs when I came across this 2010 survey on global wellness from Buck Consultants.  I found the geographic differences really interesting, and I thought I’d share a few of the charts here.

Intl Drivers of Wellness strategy Buck

Top wellness programs by region buck

Wellness Program Objectives - Buck

If you want to see their 2012 report on what’s next for wellness, you can go here.

Books / Articles, Care Management, Healthcare, Research, Value Propositions

Several Great Presentations To Share

March 19, 2014 by George Van Antwerp 0 Comments

I try not to do a lot of promotion of things within the company.  (This is not a corporate blog.)  But, I’m always happy to share cool things that are in the public domain that catch my eye. 

Our sister company – GSW Worldwide – has been putting out a lot of new things on a blog, through their innovation lab, and through their SlideShare channel.  I thought I would highlight a few of those here.  Leigh Householder, Chief Innovation Officer, along with Ritesh Patel, Global Head of Digital, are driving a lot of this along with others on their teams. 

 

Healthcare
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Internet Turns 25 – Looking Back And Forward

March 18, 2014 by George Van Antwerp 0 Comments

happy birthday

Wow!  The Internet turned 25.  Do you remember when you started using computers and technology?  I can.

I think my first computer was the Commodore 64 which we plugged into our home TV for a monitor and used a tape recorder to store files and access programs.

commodore 64

I can remember when we got 3 Macintosh computers to use at school.

first Mac

I can remember when we got our IBM PC Jr.

IBM PC Jr

After that, computers started being a little more common where we had them in high school for typing, but at the same time, people were using electric typewriters more than computers.  (I can’t believe that they still sell electric typewriters – see Wal-Mart ad.)

I can then remember being at the University of Michigan with massive computer labs of Apple computers.  At that time, I still remember using the Gopher technology that had been developed out of the University of Minnesota and pre-dated today’s Internet and HTML.

gopher

This eventually led to all the excitement about physical companies having websites and being able to do amazing things like order pizza online…the rise of e-commerce and eventually the dotcom bubble.

I still smile when I think that one of my first assignments in healthcare was to convince managed care companies to build a website.  I flew all around the country as a consultant with Ernst & Young LLP meeting with teams to convince them of what the Internet could do, why they should build a website, what functionality to put on it, and how to drive members to the website.

And, now, our kids grow up with this as normal.  Everything can be “googled”.  There is no card catalog to look things up or waiting to figure out why someone is late.  Things are instantly available.  (If you’ve never seen the list of what graduates will never remember, here’s a link to their 2017 graduate list.  Always interesting.)

So, I’ll wrap this up with a look at the future from a new report by PEW.  Here’s 15 predictions from their report:

1) Information sharing over the Internet will be so effortlessly interwoven into daily life that it will become invisible, flowing like electricity, often through machine intermediaries.

2) The spread of the Internet will enhance global connectivity that fosters more planetary relationships and less ignorance.

3) The Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and big data will make people more aware of their world and their own behavior.

4) Augmented reality and wearable devices will be implemented to monitor and give quick feedback on daily life, especially tied to personal health.

5) Political awareness and action will be facilitated and more peaceful change and public uprisings like the Arab Spring will emerge.

6) The spread of the ‘Ubernet’ will diminish the meaning of borders, and new ‘nations’ of those with shared interests may emerge and exist beyond the capacity of current nation-states to control.

7) The Internet will become ‘the Internets’ as access, systems, and principles are renegotiated

8) An Internet-enabled revolution in education will spread more opportunities, with less money spent on real estate and teachers.

9) Dangerous divides between haves and have-nots may expand, resulting in resentment and possible violence.

10) Abuses and abusers will ‘evolve and scale.’ Human nature isn’t changing; there’s laziness, bullying, stalking, stupidity, pornography, dirty tricks, crime, and those who practice them have new capacity to make life miserable for others.

11) Pressured by these changes, governments and corporations will try to assert power — and at times succeed — as they invoke security and cultural norms.

12) People will continue — sometimes grudgingly — to make tradeoffs favoring convenience and perceived immediate gains over privacy; and privacy will be something only the upscale will enjoy.

13) Humans and their current organizations may not respond quickly enough to challenges presented by complex networks.

14) Most people are not yet noticing the profound changes today’s communications networks are already bringing about; these networks will be even more disruptive in the future.

15) Foresight and accurate predictions can make a difference; ‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it.’

 

Books / Articles, Business Tools, Events, General Thoughts, Technology

Why Do We Let People Pick The Wrong Health Plan?

March 17, 2014 by George Van Antwerp 1 Comment

I was reading some of the research by McKinsey this morning on the individual market enrollment and the overall exchange product benefit design.  It got me thinking about the issue where consumers choose the wrong plan design based on their personal utilization of healthcare.  Why do we let that happen?

I know some of you are thinking “let that happen”…we don’t do that.  Others who work in the industry may be thinking that consumers can make good decisions. 

But, we know that consumers don’t spend enough time evaluating their options.  We know that consumers are overwhelmed by all the information they get about healthcare.  We know that consumers don’t have access to all their data.  And, we know that consumers can’t understand all the healthcare mumbo-jumbo that we use to explain what we do. 

“The ACA deals with the problem of consumer misunderstanding by requiring insurance companies to publish standardized and simplified information about insurance plans, including what consumers would pay for four basic services,” noted lead author Loewenstein. “However, presenting simplified information about something that is inherently complex introduces a risk of ‘smoothing over’ real complexities. A better approach, in my view, would be to require insurance companies to offer truly simplified insurance products that consumers are capable of understanding.” (source of this study)

This study from a few months ago predicted that over half of consumers would choose the wrong plan thereby causing them to spend more money out-of-pocket annually for their healthcare.  Companies understand this.  There is an initiative called Putting Patients First which created a cost estimation tool – http://www.puttingpatientsfirst.net/.  This conceptually helps.

But, the reason I say “let” is because the healthcare companies all have our data.  They know our medical claims.  They know our pharmacy claims.  They have our lab values.  Everyone has predictive risk models now.  If that data could be downloaded to a Personal Health Record (PHR) and then used to model our costs under each of the benefit plan options, we could make an informed decision. 

And, no…this isn’t just a healthcare.gov issue.  Most employees have had access to multiple plan options at their employer for years.  Sometimes all under the same health plan and sometimes with multiple health plans.  I’ve talked about this for a long time.  This would be relatively simple for an IT team to build and deploy.  It could also be a huge catalyst for the PHR movement to get data into the hands of the consumers and give them a reason to do this.  If I knew I could save $500+ per year by tracking and using my data, that should be a great reason to take action. 

Healthcare
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Fail Fast To Succeed Sooner – The Big Company Challenge

March 12, 2014 by George Van Antwerp 6 Comments

I was reading an article this morning about asking the question “are you afraid to fail?”  It’s an article about innovation which reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from David Kelley at IDEO.

Fail Faster

It also reminded me of another article from 2006 in Business Week about How Failure Breeds Success which was when I left Express Scripts to pursue several entrepreneurial opportunities.

Stefan H. Thomke, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of Experimentation Matters, says that when he talks to business groups, “I try to be provocative and say: ‘Failure is not a bad thing.’ I always have lots of people staring at me, [thinking] ‘Have you lost your mind?’ That’s O.K. It gets their attention. [Failure] is so important to the experimental process.”

BW Failure Cover

It also got me thinking about success rates in companies.  We all hear so much about the success of entrepreneurs and these 20 year old billionaires.  Is that reality?  Here’s a few stats from an article in the WSJ and a study by the Census Bureau.

  • 80% of companies make it to year one
  • 60% of companies make it to year three
  • 50% of companies make it to year five
  • 35% of companies make it to year ten

Sounds pretty depressing.  What about the fact that according to the WSJ article, only 5% of them achieve the projected ROI and 30-40% of them liquidate all their assets returning nothing.

“People are embarrassed to talk about their failures, but the truth is that if you don’t have a lot of failures, then you’re just not doing it right, because that means that you’re not investing in risky ventures.  I believe failure is an option for entrepreneurs and if you don’t believe that, then you can bang your head against the wall trying to make it work.” (David Cowan – Bessemer Venture Partners in WSJ article)

Just watch the show Shark Tank sometime.  There are amazing entrepreneurs with interesting ideas who have sacrificed so much to try to make it work.  I always try to tell people that it’s not just about passion and hard work otherwise people would succeed all the time.  Some things you do learn from Shark Tank along with the book The Art of the Start is how to frame and present your ideas.

So, why is this so important?  We’re on the the verge of huge transformation in the healthcare industry.  I think Oliver Wyman did a good job of discussing this in a whitepaper last year.  You can read article after article about mHealth, telemedicine, and remote monitoring.  (I’ll point you to Rock Health or The Center For Connected Health as two starting points.)

Of course innovation has been the buzz for several years now.  I think Jim Collins does a good job of teeing up this issue in discussing churn in the Fortune 500 list.  With the technology and VC crowd, the more recent term for business model innovation is “pivot“.  I think you’ve seen a lot more Chief Innovation Officers and innovation labs in healthcare companies these days.

I came across an interesting blend of technology consulting, investing, and innovation last night in the BCG Digital Ventures group.  In watching part of a YouTube video by their CEO, I think he does a great job summarizing how consulting maps to the investment paradigm.

  • Innovation is like seed capital
  • Product development is like venture capital
  • Commercialization is like growth capital

Interestingly, I probably get 1-2 calls a week from people in big companies that really want to get out of the big company and come work in the exciting start-up space.  I always tell them that the grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence so be careful.  It can be great, but it can be really tough.  It’s just a different type of risk and not everyone can take the emotional and potentially financial risk.  On the flipside, I also get people that look at the different entrepreneurial things I’ve done and say “why?”  They want to know why I didn’t just stay in a F500 company.  Sometimes, I think of this 8 years as a boomerang where I’ll end up back in a F500 company, but I’ll be a much more valuable product development, strategy, and innovation executive.  [This idea of boomeranging was one that Gensler introduced me to years ago in architecture where they encouraged people to work at different companies and come back if relevant.]

Depending on the day, I also think about what I’ve learned since I’ve never had one of those huge exits that everyone talks about.  I’m not cashing in on all my options to make money.  I’ve summarized many of those learnings on the blog, but here’s a few that I’ll call out.

  1. Firepond was my first venture into this space.  It was a 20-year company that General Atlantic had invested in to turn around as a product configurator in the CRM space.
    • Learned about CRM (customer relationship management) technology.
    • Learned about how to develop, structure, and manage alliances.
    • Learned the importance and how to structure offshore deals.
    • Learned about global sales and embedding technology into different solutions.
    • Learned about evaluating and buying companies.
  2. CentralScript was my second venture I started it from an idea I tried to sell at Express Scripts (and later was suggested to them by Clayton Christensen).
    • Learned about writing a business plan and financial modeling and projections.
    • Learned about the legal structure of businesses.
    • Learned about raising money and how to work with and evaluate angels and VCs.
    • Learned about building a team and structuring contracts with them.
    • Learned about selling and evaluating partners.
  3. Talisen Technologies was my third venture which was another turnaround where I worked with a friend of mine who had raise some private equity to do a technology services consulting roll-up.
    • Learned about Business Process Management technology.
    • Learned about how to build support companies around a technology platform.  (The opposite of Firepond where I was the technology company.)
    • Learned about the difficulties of transforming an existing company and evaluating new companies.
    • Learned about how to use blogging and create exposure using social media.
  4. Silverlink was my fourth venture (and most successful experience) and first real start-up where it wasn’t trying to turnaround an existing asset but building off what the founders had built.
    • Learned about how to present to and work with the Board of Directors.
    • Learned about managing a sales force.
    • Learned about product development, training, documentation, and product lifecycle.
    • Learned about sales and marketing and being responsible for growth and a team.
    • Learned about account management.
    • Learned the value of using thought leadership, social media, and the press to drive awareness and pipeline.
    • Learned how to develop competitive analysis and differentiation.
    • Leraned about pricing and analytics.
  5. inVentiv Medical Management is my current venture which is part of a broader entity, but it’s still the same concept which is a 20-year old company that we’re transforming into a new platform and new business model.
    • Still in-progress so more to come…

So, I wrote all this to make the point that innovation is difficult.  You have to take some risks.  Like the article said upfront, you have to believe you can fail.  You have to have a plan for what to do if you do fail.  Big companies should provide a safety net to people to fail fast.  I think I’ve learned a ton that I wouldn’t have learned staying in the big company.  At the right time, that will be a huge asset as I look to help drive the transformation and pivoting of a larger entity!

Books / Articles, General Business, General Thoughts, Healthcare, Innovation, Leadership, Methodology, Research, Value Propositions

Gimme My Damn Data Win – Labs; Will Clinical Trials Be Next

March 3, 2014 by George Van Antwerp 0 Comments

It’s been really interesting over the past few years to watch the discussion about who should get data and when should they get it (see ePatient Dave post).  Lab data has been the perfect case study. 

In the traditional model:

  • We (consumers/members/patients) go to a physician who writes up a lab order.
  • The physician may draw the blood or send you to a hospital lab or you might go to a LabCorp or Quest facility.
  • The lab values are returned to your physician.
  • You may or may not ever hear about your results especially if they’re normal.

This traditional model begs two questions:

  1. What should you do to get access to the results? (see Trisha Torrey post on this)
  2. If the physician doesn’t have time to get to them and call you, should you get them directly? (see KevinMD post on this)

Fortunately, HHS made a decision last month to require lab data be available to patients directly without the physician gatekeeper.  Of course, they have 30-days to comply with the patient request, and it still requires the patient to request it.  But, it’s a start. 

This is like the Open Notes project that made physician notes available to patients. 

“They found that when patients have access to their doctors’ notes, they feel more in control of their health care, better understand their medical issues, and report they are more likely to take their medications as prescribed.”

As we think about patient engagement, this type of transparency is important. 

The next area of discussion might be around clinical trials.  The people over at PatientsLikeMe just published an article discussing this topic and sharing how patients are working around clinical trials to identify themselves.  I’m sure that most pharma companies and clinical trial companies will view this as heresy.  But, it’s a modern day reality in terms of mobile and social technology.  The question is how will this change clinical trials and will it improve results. 

I certainly think that the data coming out of P2P (peer-to-peer) companies like PatientsLikeMe or CureTogether is really interesting. 

Healthcare

9 Lessons Learned About Gamification

March 3, 2014 by George Van Antwerp 1 Comment

As I was writing the post about gamification in healthcare, it got me thinking about what I’ve learned about gaming especially in today’s device centric world.  [As a side note, I certainly wouldn’t take advice on gaming strategy from someone who doesn’t play games.]

Whenever I go on vacation, I always pick a new game to download to my iPad and iPhone to play with.  My devices have things like:

  • Nuts
  • Tiny Wings
  • Temple Run
  • Doodle Jump
  • Jetpack
  • Tiny Tower
  • WipeOut
  • Subway Surfer
  • Sunday Lawn
  • Torpedo Run
  • Battle Nations
  • Clash of Clans
  • Candy Crush
  • Angry Birds

As I think about the games, they fall into several buckets:

  • Quick Hits – I play them a few times then delete them.
  • Interesting – I play them on and off when bored usually with a one week spike at the beginning.
  • Long-Term – I play them multiple times a week (or day) for months.

But, in the end, most games fail to keep you engaged long-term.  But, based on what gets the best engagement, here’s what I’ve learned:

  1. Games need to be relatively simple to understand and play.  There can’t be much to learn or read about them.
  2. Games have to constantly be upgrading and evolving – new levels, new upgrades, new things to earn, new challenges.
  3. Games should be able to be played online and offline.
  4. Games should offer you rewards to keep you coming back every day.
  5. Games need to be social so you can compare yourself to others, compete with people, and collaborate.
  6. Games can’t be too easy or they are boring.
  7. Games can’t be too hard or they are frustrating.
  8. Games that have you build things get you to come back and check status, but the build time can’t be too long (e.g., 6 days to wait for something to be ready).
  9. Good games will create a user community for sharing ideas and discussing success with challenges.
Blogroll, Healthcare

Healthcare Gamification

March 3, 2014 by George Van Antwerp 4 Comments

If you believe all the hype about digital health, you might think gamification was a natural solution.  Of course, if you’ve never heard of gamification, let me provide a basic definition from Wikipedia.

Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems.

Here’s several articles for more information:

  1. Four Factors Driving Gamification in Healthcare
  2. From FitBit to Fitocracy
  3. The Wellness Game
  4. Gamification: Drugmakers And Health Campaigners Turn To Games To Promote Health

I think this quote from the Perficient white paper on this topic is a good one.

Gabe Zichermann, the author of Game-Based Marketing, speaks of balancing the fun and frivolity of gamification with the task of making life easier for cancer patients. He says, “I don’t presume to think that we can make having cancer into a purely fun experience. But, we have data to show that when we give cancer patients gamified experiences to help them manage their drug
prescriptions and manage chemotherapy, they improve their emotional state and also their adherence to their protocol.”

You can also look at a post by Jane Sarasohn-Kahn (one of my favorite bloggers) on this topic where she highlights several trends from a recent paper on gamification in healthcare.

Now, why should you care?

  1. Gamification should improve engagement which is critical to changing behavior.
  2. Gamification creates opportunities to make healthcare fun which can be difficult.
  3. People are different and respond to different “incentives”.  Competition and leader boards are concepts that excite lots of people to take action.

The forecasts for the gamification market are huge.  They show a nice hockey stick which gets every investor excited.

1

Of course, the important question is who uses games.  Is it just teenage boys?  It’s not.  Here’s a good report which shows you breakdown by age, gender, and many other stats.

Gaming

Another quick article about gamification is from TEDMED.  The video is below, but it reminds me of some of my personal perspectives.  The sites also lists out several vendors and solutions in the obesity gamification space.

While one “easy” opportunity in my mind is to use gamification to address the rising number of kids with chronic diseases and to help address childhood obesity, there are many other opportunities like adherence.  A few examples of games out there include:

Companies like Ayogo, Mango Health, and Akili are ones that I’ve heard about, but I know there are a lot more out there.

One example I think of from watching my kids play games is from Webkinz which was a blend of real stuffed animals with online digital personas.  The animals could get sick if you didn’t nurture them and visit them.  It made me think of how an avatar could get fatter or slower based on their pedometer or eating habits.

Books / Articles, Business Tools, Healthcare, Marketing / Communications, Methodology, mHealth, Software, Technology, Value Propositions