- Walgreens is launching a “gameified” digital adherence program with HealthPrize. The program, which could start by the end of 2016, will initially be offered to patients with diabetes who take certain drugs – HealthPrize is working on enlisting a number of pharmas as sponsors. It will be web-based to start – “mobile friendly,” but no app.
- AstraZeneca is partnering with Quintiles on a clinical trial testing the impact of mobile medication reminders on adherence in COPD patients, joining an ever-longer list of brands in the category fielding smart inhalers.
- McDonald’s cancelled a Happy Meals fitness tracker promotion after reports of kids suffering skin irritation from the brightly-colored step-counting bands. But isn’t the news here that fitness trackers are now so thoroughly mainstream as to be a Happy Meal toy?
- IBM Watson is rolling out Watson for Oncology, the cognitive learning decision support tool incubated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in 21 hospitals across China through a partnership with Hangzhou CognitiveCare.
- The WSJ recently ran a great check-in on telemedicine, which is growing fast, though reimbursement and patchwork state regulations continue to pose barriers to adoption. Interesting tidbit here: Cleveland Clinic, which has worked in recent years to position itself as an international destination medical center ala Mayo or Johns Hopkins, is now working on building a “Cleveland Clinic in the cloud” via telemedicine.
- An Apple acquisition of a healthcare-focused startup is generating buzz about the company’s not-so-secret health ambitions. Gliiimpse, which Apple acquired earlier this year, aims to make patient medical data more portable and sharable across systems, providers and devices – a mission that would seem a good fit for Apple’s HealthKit, CareKit and ResearchKit platforms.
- Speaking of which, an Apple architect opened up on where the Apple Watch team ran into trouble with health sensors. Bottom line: efforts to incorporate a more powerful array of sensors were bigfooted by the design team, because at Apple, the UX is king.
- Arianna Huffington is famously obsessed with sleep, so it’s fitting that she’s leaving her eponymous digital media company, the Huffington Post, to join a digital health startup working on a suite of wellness apps, many of which focus on improving sleep. Thrive Global plans a consumer play, with online sales of digital and analog wellness products (from apps to scented candles), along with a B2B pitch.
- Aetna is withdrawing its ACA individual market plans from all but four states, citing daunting losses on policies sold through the program. ACA supporters say Aetna’s just sore because the Obama administration vetoed their planned merger with Humana on antitrust grounds (and reporting confirms this). Regardless, coming on the heels of UnitedHealthcare’s exit, it’s a blow to Obamacare’s individual insurance marketplace – the remaining participants in many states will face little competition, though a number of big insurers, including Kaiser Permanente and the Blues, are sticking it out. Faced with aggressively price-oriented plan shoppers, the remainder tend to look more like Medicaid than employer-provided plans – low premiums, super-narrow networks and no-frills coverage.
- The Affordable Care Act has covered an estimated 20 million formerly uninsured Americans, but 24 million remain uninsured. They skew younger, Hispanic and Southern, being heavily concentrated in states that have not expanded Medicaid.
- Those retiring this year will need $260,000 to cover their healthcare costs in retirement. That’s up 6% on 2015.
- Copay cards: Not just for pricey branded drugs anymore, as companies including Novartis begin to use them to ease access to generics and biosimilars.
- Mylan incurred the wrath of pretty much everyone (including Martin Shkreli?) with a rapid-fire series of price hikes that have raised the cost of an EpiPen set from $103 in 2009 to $608 in May. Mylan bought the product, which can be a lifesaver for people with severe allergies, in 2007. Meanwhile, PhRMA is gearing up for an epic lobbying battle after November, as lawmakers of both parties aim to rein in drug prices.
- A startup aims to nudge newly-insured patients to utilize less expensive care, using behavioral science and predictive analytics to target patients for interventions and suggesting simple lifestyle or behavior changes.
- A Xerox survey confirms something we’ve found in our research: a disconnect in perceptions of patient empowerment – “Payers and providers are much less likely to believe patients are taking responsibility for their health than what patients perceive to be true,” underscoring a need for improved communication (and therein, an opportunity for pharma value-adds).
- Pharma bloggers are asking if the advent of Instagram’s Stories function, which allows for comments-off posting of content, permanently or in Snapchat-style temporary increments, means it’s time for Pharma to take another look at the platform.
- FDA has lost a string of cases in recent years testing its powers to prohibit pharma reps from engaging in any discussion of off-label uses of treatments with HCPs. Now BIO and PhRMA have fired a shot across the agency’s bow, releasing a set of guidelines for “truthful and non-misleading” communication of off-label info.
- The FTC slapped cloud EHR company Practice Fusion with a 20-year privacy practice order stemming from a scandal over the firm’s posting of un-blinded patient reviews – without, per FTC, consent of the patients.
- Oncology M&A still red hot: Pfizer is buying prostate cancer specialist Medivation, which makes blockbuster Xtandi and was recently the subject of a hostile takeover bid by Sanofi, for $14b.
- Doctors at NYU Langone used 3D printing and modeling to tackle a hard-to-treat case of a rare bone cancer. Meanwhile, 3D printed pills are on the horizon, and that could mean major intellectual property headaches for pharmas.
