As it turns out, we never hear smart stories about fitness care. I get it. Our formula is massive and complex, accounting for 17 percent of our gross domestic product. No one wants to get sick, and when we do, we are faced with a labyrinth of features and a world full of opinions, doctors, medicines. and, of course, invoices.
In the midst of all this and our daily news cycles, it’s understandable that we lose our attitude and about the successes of the fitness care industry. Looking back over the past 40 years, I remember several wonderful successes that have actually taken a step forward. Advanced physical care.
Unfortunately, I am also aware of large, ambitious projects that have not produced the desired results. As a leader who encourages other people to be informed of their mistakes, I think it is vital that we take inventory of successes and mistakes and take a look to be informed of them.
It’s Super Bowl season, so let’s take a close look at some of Healthcare’s most important touchdowns, fumbles and still-in-progress plays.
CVS stops promoting cigarettes. In one of the bravest acts in the history of fashion business, CVS lost $2 billion in sales and many millions in profits in 2014 through cigarettes on its shelves. This resolution led to a significant drop in cigarette sales across the country.
While we applaud CVS for its ambitious move, let’s point out the competition that has yet to maintain its lead. More than 250 US cities, Massachusetts and New York have banned tobacco sales in pharmacies. But the resolution is not over. to regulators. Smoking makes other people sick. Pharmacies exist to improve the health of other people. Those who continue to sell deadly poisons to the public are shamefully out of step with their missions.
Merck supplies bulk ivermectin to end river blindness. There is no river blindness in Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala or Mexico. In many other countries, the disease is close to being eradicated. This good fortune will have to be attributed to Merck (one of my former employers), the pharmaceutical company that since 1987 has donated around five billion treatments for the parasitic disease to people in 57 countries.
When Merck began its program, chairman Dr. P. Roy Vagelos said the company decided to give Ivermectin away “because those who need it the most could not afford to pay for it.” These days, pharmaceutical companies are better known for their extraordinary profits than for making medicines that help people. Yet the FDA just approved two treatments for sickle cell disease, a debilitating blood disorder that affects at least 100,000 Americans, most of whom are Black. Donating treatments to people in developing countries was an extraordinary act of generosity. Maybe it’s time to try it closer to home.
Operation Warp Speed ends the COVID pandemic. The credits will go to Big Pharma, however, the immediate progression and rollout of COVID vaccines is largely due to a $10 billion public-private partnership between the federal government and six pharmaceutical companies. The concept was to drive the progression of a vaccine by investing heavily in promising technologies. Today, COVID is more of a nuisance than a killer, and that’s why we can thank the federal government for creating what deserves to be a style of how to respond to fitness emergencies.
Pharmaceutical inventions treated incurable diseases in the past. In 1987, 32,000 Americans contracted HIV and half of them died. The term “plague” has been used extensively.
Meanwhile, starting in the early 1980s, researchers at the federal National Cancer Institute tested an old cancer drug from the 60s called AZT. In clinical trials carried out by the National Institutes of Health, AZT, one of a class of drugs called “Anti-Retroviral Therapies (ART), was shown to improve the immune responses of people infected with HIV. Unfortunately, the side effects were devastating and the benefits short-lived.
But that wasn’t the case with a three-drug mix introduced in 1995 through pharmaceutical corporations and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Antiretroviral treatment prevented 9. 5 million deaths worldwide between 1995 and 2015. Today, millions of people around the world are living with HIV. Once again, the public and private sectors have worked together to end a scourge.
It turns out that we are entering a similar era of clinical innovation. Keytruda largely for mesastatic cancers. Zolgensma for spinal muscular atrophy. Kymriah for mobile leukemia B. And the list goes on. There’s no doubt that the trendy pharmaceutical industry is introducing new categories of life-saving drugs every day. With the explosion of new therapies, it turns out that we may be entering a new era of biotechnology and innovation.
Warren Buffett, Jamie Dimon, and Jeff Bezos jumped into the world of healthcare with Haven. Not much was accomplished in this regard.
Berkshire Hathaway, JP Morgan, and Amazon shape Haven. Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon. With those names attached, how can it go wrong?
The purpose was to find a way to access fitness facilities and lower prices for workers at all 3 companies, make access to number one healthcare less difficult, prescription drugs more affordable, and insurance benefits less difficult to understand.
Though Haven shut down shut down in 2021, I’m hesitant to discount the players just because their team didn’t make the playoffs. Amazon has since acquired One Medical Group, adding it to healthcare operations that include an online pharmacy. And JP Morgan’s Morgan Health is investing $250 million of its parent company’s capital in promising healthcare companies with a goal to improve employer-sponsored care. I, for one, am excited to see what happens next.
Steve Case invests $500 million to build Revolution Health. In 2005, AOL co-founder Steve Case announced that he would dedicate $500 million of his fortune to Revolution Health, a new company designed to “put patients at the center of the physical care system, with more choice, more convenience, more control. “The corporate CarePages center, a site designed to allow family and friends to talk when a loved one is sick.
Revolution was a highly prized commodity at the time, one of many startups designed to turn patients into consumers. But as temporarily as it began, the Revolution lost steam. In 2007, the company laid off a quarter of its workforce and later merged with WebMD’s parent company.
The reason for the company’s demise could have been because, as I have already explained, patients are not consumers. Sick people don’t want to buy a sports car. And the joy of someone who can compare a new car is completely different from that of someone with cancer. Case came up with the idea to invest her money and his talents in a sports car after watching her brother battle cancer. He was right about wanting to fix the system, even if his plan to do so wasn’t perfect; This is an example that long-term reformers carefully examine and inform themselves about.
Big tech meets fitnesscare. It’s hard to go a week without seeing an article that tells us all the wonderful things big tech is doing in fitness care. Technology corporations have brought to market products and facilities that have replaced many of our lives. And yet, those corporations have yet to live up to expectations for investments in physical care. For all the money and skill they’ve mobilized, they haven’t made a difference in fitness results. At best, they haven’t come up with some new point solutions.
Healthcare is a highly matrixed industry built fundamentally around threat control. If those corporations want to be successful, they will want to dive deeper into the group beyond the classic progression of razor and blade products and perhaps go further and become parents. A few years pass. , I proposed that they take complete fitness systems (much like what General Catalyst undertook; more on that later) and rebuild them on a chassis of advanced technology-based fitness care solutions, along with control operations. physically powerful threats. Under this model, they can simply demonstrate how operations can become simpler, how comprehensive patient care can supplant fee-for-service care, how payers and providers can be integrated, and how administrative burdens can be reduced.
There is a precedent for what I am asking for. Amazon has been in the grocery business for years. But it wasn’t until Amazon bought Whole Foods that the tech company showed us how it can combine low prices, home delivery, technology, and logo loyalty into a compelling business. Perhaps this is the kind of transformation they had in their brains when they acquired One Medical, even though number one care is just one piece (albeit a vitally important one) piece of the wonderful healthcare puzzle.
Great fusion of fitness formulas. Prices are rising. In 2023, mergers and acquisitions of fitnesscare formulas totaled $38 billion. It turns out that every time one of those mergers is announced, the company that gets the other promises the public (and regulators) that prices will go down and quality will go up.
And yet, as Leemore Dafny, an economist at Harvard Business School, reports: “When competition merges, it is let go and there is little evidence of an improvement in the quality of care patients receive. . . There is also sufficient evidence that the quality of care is declining. “
Consolidation can take care of the patient and reduce prices if it is done for the purpose of achieving those purposes; otherwise, it would not deserve to be allowed. If there’s a silver lining to this story, it’s that Biden’s leadership announced in December a series of measures “to prevent mergers and anticompetitive practices by dominant corporations in health care markets. “Health-focused mergers and acquisitions, which will do more than just communicate healthcare communication, led by a new generation of healthcare formula leaders who can prove 1:1 >2 for patients.
Kaiser Permanente’s resolve to take Geisinger may lead to a revolution. Only time will tell.
General Catalyst takes Summa Health For-profit as its innovation lab. Is a for-profit fitness formula more likely to succeed in an industry that has become increasingly unstable?Akron-based Summa Health is a not-for-profit fitness formula that employs an additional 8,000 people and supplies comprehensive fitness facilities to more than one million patients. But it also trades at a loss. Enter General Catalyst, one of the largest venture capital firms in the United States. Through its subsidiary HATCo, it plans to acquire Summa and turn it into a for-profit entity. As the owner of a comprehensive fitness care formula, General Catalyst hopes to drive generation adoption and demonstrate the art of what’s possible.
Summa contributed more than $210 million in 2022 to network fitness programs. The cash was used to provide care to low-income individuals, fund network fitness facilities, and alleviate medical debt. Will Summa continue to invest in the communities it serves once it becomes a subsidiary?From one of the largest venture capital firms in the United States?HatCo’s CEO says he intends to make Summa “a permanent organization for the network it serves. “
But investor-led healthcare has a mixed track record. A recent study showed that adverse events, such as falls and infections, increased 25% at hospitals acquired by private equity. While General Catalyst, a venture capital firm, has far broader ambitions than most private equity firms (not to mention some of the industry’s smartest minds around the table in Ken Frazier, Marc Harrison, Steve Klasko, and Hemant Taneja), it is an experiment worth watching closely. If the conversion pays off—Summa’s one million patients (and General Catalyst) will benefit richly.
Kaiser Permanente Acquires Geisinger, Creates Risant. Au Last spring, Kaiser announced plans to acquire Pennsylvania-based Geisinger Health and integrate it into Risant, a new company designed to manage nonprofit netpaintings fitness formulas. The agreement is vital because it shows Kaiser’s new willingness to extend outdoor fitness formula tables from its closed tables. Tellingly, Geisinger will not have a Kaiser Permanente formula and its doctors will not be part of the Permanente medical teams it has collaborated with for decades.
Will it succeed and “drive greater affordability for health care in this country,” as Kaiser head Greg Adams says it will? Even if the deal is approved by regulators, we won’t be able to judge its success until Kaiser finds a second system to incorporate into the Risant model. If together they can use economies of scale to improve care while remaining focused on their communities, Kaiser will have found a way to do something that has eluded most others looking to consolidate.
Congress authorizes the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to create the Center for Innovation (CMMI). CMMI was established in 2010 as a component of the Affordable Care Act. It was created to be the engine of CMS for payment and delivery reform. And that may still be the case.
The effects of the early days of CMMI (a member of its founding team) are combined. It has created more than 50 payment styles of choice and 30 of them are operational. Its value-based insurance (VBID) design style shows promise for expansion. Care coordination and cost reduction for low-income beneficiaries, i. e. , those at the end of life.
At the same time, many of its models showed limited cost savings and quality improvements, the quality of its data was questioned, and the company faced an uphill war to enroll physician practices in value-based payment models. CMMI can be a major driving force for a true upgrade in our fitness formula, and its current leadership is leading it in the right direction, but it needs big wins to prove that it can, by achieving its full potential, influence the fitness formula.
In addition to wondering whether the Chiefs or the 49ers will win the big game, in recent years I’ve also been wondering what the next few decades will hold for fitness care. Look for the ambitious steps above, whether successful or unsuccessful, to influence the industry as it struggles to balance the preference for caring for and saving lives with the drive for profit.