Improving the Managed Care-Pharma Interface (4-Part Series)
Submitted by Dr. JG Kaplan on Thu, 2009-04-30 16:27
This may be the perfect time for synergism between the health care and pharmaceutical industries.
When it comes to process and outcomes measurement and management, the pharmaceutical industry and those delivering care have different foci. For example, Pharma largely concentrates on "product" and healthcare, on "service." At the level of patient care, these industries are on the same page, but beyond post-marketing research, whenever they collaborate, everyone gets paranoid about real or perceived conflicts of interest. This is causing a paradigm paralysis and I feel we need to get past that.
The Paradigm Problem
Thomas Kuhn in his 1970 publication, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" stipulated there can be no paradigm change without crisis. Well, we are clearly in one right now—there's large and unexplained variation in practice, the growing ranks of the uninsured or those financially devastated by just having the misfortune of illness or disability is daily palpable, and to put salt in the wound, the "payers" have their own definition of 'reasonable and necessary.'
Many industrialized countries seem to be better than us at improving the value of health care, especially as they are spending less and having outcomes that are equal to, if not better than ours. This observation survives potential confounds such as genetic and other population differences, or dissimilarity in how data are defined or tracked.
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