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In this special guest feature, Inga Shugalo, a Healthcare Industry Analyst at Itransition, suggests that whether it’s an application for precision medicine, decreasing the failure rates in drug trials, or lowering the cost of research and developing better medicine, big data has a bright future for the pharmaceutical industry.

Partnerships between insurers, health systems and medtech companies as well as insight gleaned from Big Data are going to key to the success of value-based care in the medical devices industry.

Insights from Big data and partnerships among medtech companies, insurers and health systems will drive the success of value-based care.

That was the message from industry executives gathered at the annual conference of the medtech industry — AdvaMed 2016 — in Minneapolis that concluded Wednesday.

Those partnerships are already leading to better clinical outcomes, said Dr. Richard Migliori, chief medical officer of UnitedHealthcare. Medtronic became the preferred provider of insulin pumps for UnitedHealth Group’s commercial and Medicaid patients in July in an initiative to reduce hypoglycemia incidents that frequently send patients to the emergency room.

“It’s just a great way of linking back from a desired outcome to a delivery system that’s focused on that outcome,” Migliori said.

Migliori and executives from Medtronic, Mayo Clinic, and IBM Watson Health agreed that the move toward value-based care will continue, despite the impending change in U.S. political administrations.

“The move to value-based payment is pretty important but it’s also undefined at the moment,” said Dr. John Noseworthy, CEO of Mayo Clinic.

Mayo is focused on understanding the value that its system provides by quickly getting the answers to helping patients with complex conditions, and bringing in technology early in the process to advance that effort, Noseworthy said. Mayo is looking for strategic partners to help in those efforts, he added.

Those partners for hospitals and medtech companies needn’t be as large as a Medtronic to get new technology to market, according to Noseworthy and Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak. Smaller medtech companies can move more quickly to develop products because they don’t have to contend with the layers of bureaucracy that exist at a large corporation, Ishrak explained. If the healthcare industry values outcomes over products, whoever finds an effective solution to a healthcare problem will get credit for that, he said.

Stifling the creativity of small companies would be a “huge mistake,” added Noseworthy. “There are some advantages in being small. You don’t have to ask for permission. You just ask for forgiveness later on.”

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence is also expected to help drive health systems as well as medtech companies to improve patient outcomes and value-based care. Experts said AI resembles the Internet of the mid 1990s and will expand into a variety of products and services, according to a report in the New York Times.

Applying cognitive value to data from a variety of sources will help lead to the best patient outcomes for the best value, said Deborah DiSanzo,  general manager of IBM Watson Health. IBM Watson Health is working with Mayo by funneling clinical trial information directly to oncologists so they may determine which patients might be eligible to participate, she said.

The U.S. healthcare system would be wise to look toward the Netherlands and some of the Scandinavian countries for leadership in executing value-based models, Medtronic’s Ishrak noted. Those countries have good healthcare data and have worked in different conditions to execute value-based models, although they haven’t been scaled across any one particular country yet, he said. The Netherlands instituted a bundled-payment model for diabetes in 2007, in which insurers pay a care delivery group to cover diabetes care services for one year, according to a report in Harvard Business Review.

“One thing is for certain,” Ishrak declared. “The move is going to happen and everybody is going to have to change. I can’t change my business model without everybody here changing their business model.”

If 2015 healthcare investment levels are any indication, investors the world over are focusing on patient experience above all other digital health investment subsectors.

Arundhati Parmar IBM announced Tuesday that it has formally created a business unit called IBM Watson Health, based in Boston, that will execute on its overarching goal to transform personal healthcare. To that end, the company is also launching the Watson Health Cloud to "provide a secure and open platform for physicians, researchers, insurers and companies focused on health and wellness solutions," a news release stated.

Boehringer Ingelheim has announced that it intends to make drug data from clinical trials stemming back to 1998 accessible as part of efforts to improve research transparency within the industry.

The move is part of a collaboration with fellow pharma companies Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Roche and ViiV Healthcare on an online platform to handle requests from researchers for trial data.

Boehringer's chairman Dr Andreas Barner made the announcement at Boehringer's annual company meeting yesterday, following up from a commitment to transparency announced at the same meeting in 2013.

Dr Barner, who also heads R&D at Boehringer, explained that the online platform - available at clinicalstudydatarequest.com - currently contained 50 trials available for which to request patient-level data, but the plan is to reach 500 from all involved parties.

“That's quite a job to achieve. but we have to do it in interest of what data and information can be shared with others,” said Dr Barner.

“We have always argued in favour of transparency and now want a more scientific discussion on the level of trial data and have therefore joined up with several research-based pharmaceutical companies in order to make clinical trials data and documents available to a wider public.” ....

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