7 ways Digital Health can accelerate access to life-saving medicine
When medicines are unaffordable, they cannot save lives.
Over the past years, I worked with PubGene on the mission to find the most optimal treatment options for patients with cancer, autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases. Our insights, always motivated by evidence of improved health outcomes and individual patient preferences, are not always accessible in the local healthcare system. Innovative medicines are not always reimbursed in the country where the patient lives.
We need to use the technology that our times deserve for faster equitable and affordable access to personalised medicine.
Follow along as I review seven ways the digitalisation of healthcare can accelerate the generation of evidence about costs and effectiveness that backs up the reimbursement of a drug for the group of patients that will benefit from it.
1. Generate the evidence of costs-effectiveness faster, transparently and with fewer resources
The digitalisation of Healthcare can accelerate the generation of evidence of costs and effectiveness that backs up the reimbursement of a drug. It also makes it easier to take data-driven decisions and to make the process more transparent.
2. Distribute the finite healthcare budget more intelligently
Big data analysis will find more precisely the group of patients that will benefit from a particular drug, regardless of where they live. So, the cost-benefit can be better optimised, and the healthcare budget can be more intelligently distributed.
3. Run low-risks pilots with digital therapeutics companies
Digital Therapeutics are evidence-based interventions driven by software to prevent, manage, or treat a medical disorder or disease. They provide a technical, clinical and regulatory framework that opens new opportunities to measure the costs and effectiveness of the medication on small patient groups in real-world settings. Their technology enables the continuous monitoring of impact and measures performance indicators by design. Governments can leverage pilots with developers of Digital Therapeutics to test how a drug reimbursement would impact the budget if applied on a national scale.
4. Incorporate real-world outcomes and quality of life in the reimbursement decision
Optimised treatments prescribed as early as when the patient reports the initial symptoms, and a diagnosis is reached, mean improved survival and reduced risks of side effects. Choosing treatments that enhance the quality of life and thus reduce time off work and/or disabilities will improve the country’s productivity. Such benefit projections must be incorporated into the computation of cost-benefit analyses for drug reimbursements to specific patient groups. Digital Health solutions that integrate Remote Monitoring facilitates the secure collection of patient-reported outcomes in real-world settings. It builds evidence that can then be incorporated into price negotiations.
5. Harmonise practices across the country
Medical Device Software that combines digital health and Explainable AI integrated with the electronic medical records makes it possible to find the right treatment for specific patients earlier. It harmonises practices by providing clinical decision support (CDSS) and shared decision-making. Successful CDSS provides recommendations incorporating evidence-based guidelines, experts’ knowledge and experience from previous cases and outcomes.
6. Healthcare benefits are truly for all when the system allows for individual decisions
Clinicians and patients should be empowered by tools that evaluate the relevance of experimental treatment options (off-label or clinical trials) in comparison with the national standard of care, and tools that compute faster the documentation required for application exemption (individuell søknad / off-label use) or trial enrollment based on their medical records.
Patients should be offered digital monitoring of the real-world effects of their treatments, in order to terminate treatment that doesn’t work faster. Staying connected remotely may also reduce the anxiety of prescribing or receiving a treatment that has not yet an obtained an extensive evidence basis, thus making deciding on opt-in to a trial or treatment easier. Intelligent software can help make this remote monitoring at scale efficient and with contextual delivery of educational content and rule-based triage (e.g. Kaiku Health, Moovcare).
7. Negotiate drug prices on behalf of patient groups across borders
There is a need for cross-border collaboration to negotiate prices on behalf of small patient groups. Commercial digital health solutions can help find patients who will benefit from a given treatment, regardless of residency.
Nordic programs that make searchable overviews of national health data across register owners require funding.
Digital Health will provide the framework for accelerating cost-effectiveness evidence generation, transparent outcomes and continuous monitoring to support the optimal outcome-based reimbursement policy.
I spent the last couple of years in “pandemic-distanciation”-mode, and this gave me plently of time to dream of a better system.
Join Vitae Evidence as we are building a world where the collaboration of clinicians, patients, researchers, and bioinformaticians makes personalised medicine available to all.
References
- Paying for what matters most: the future of outcomes-based payments in healthcare — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6502565/
- The value of medical innovation for the patient, healthcare services and society — https://www.roche.no/content/dam/rochexx/roche-no/roche_norway/no_NO/Documents/Verdien%20av%20medisinske%20innovasjoner%20Menon%20rapport%20juni%202021.pdf (Norwegian)
- European Commission: Making medicine more affordable — https://ec.europa.eu/health/medicinal-products/pharmaceutical-strategy-europe/making-medicines-more-affordable_en
- Solutions for rapid and sustained patient access to precision medicine https://www.efpia.eu/news-events/the-efpia-view/blog-articles/solutions-for-rapid-and-sustained-patient-access-to-precision-medicine/
