Weekly Reflection 9/22/19
This week we had some really good conversations about the readings we did outside of class and how it applied to our speakers. The speakers we have are meant to not just lecture us but generate knowledge on the industry and inform us of what we need to know in order to make it through. Our first two speakers, Dean Spooner and Dean Welch, had presentations regarding the industry itself and how it functions on a day to day basis but our last speaker, Dr. Kennedy, took a more scientific approach and focused on drug discovery today. I thought all of them tied in well and created broadened my knowledge.
On Tuesday we dove in deeper of what we read and learned the week before. We were assigned the readings "Next-generation member engagement during the care journey" and "Top health industry issues of 2019". These readings had things in common with one another as well as multiple connections to what our speakers last week talked about. The first article preached the idea that insurance companies need to get their members more involved. This is not a ploy for insurers to dive into the pockets of their customers but rather make a more efficient and effective relationship between the two. Members are making life altering decisions when it comes to health and most of the time they have no idea what the next step is. This is why they do little research and just listen the the suggestion of the first doctor they see. This is extremely detrimental to the member because they are not taking the most cost effective or health conscious route. Their lack of knowledge debilitates them, which is why insurers want to get more involve in order to help their members and make their lives easier. The approach to doing so is data mining. They want to understand their consumers better by collecting data on how they function digitally in order to provide them with the best route. Businesses do this all the time when they are trying to predict their consumers next move; they want to really know their consumer and how they function in order to give them the assistance they need. By individualizing their experience, insurance members feel more like a human then a number. I thought this connected to Dean Welch's talk about inter-professionalism which is an approach to making members of the health field more involved in the patient journey. The idea is to communicate more in order to make patients feel more safe and ultimately decrease the number of medical errors which is plaguing the industry. This idea and the article about insurers connect because they are both trying to better the journey of their consumers in order to better the industry in the end. This also connects to the patient central global payment system that Dean Welch talked about. When making members more collaborative in their insurance it is driving down costs for not only the members but the insurance company as well. This payment system is doing the same because it is trying to decrease costs for the hospital and patients by basing payment off of patient outcome; if it is a better outcome then pay will be better. This makes the patients time in the health field more effective since everyone is working together to better everyone daily experience. The second reading about the top health issues is pretty self explanatory within the title. The issues that were stated was implementing more digital therapeutics, making every individual count in the system, tax reforms, creating an affordable value line, private equity creeping up, and the affordable care act. All of these issues are important to the industry's growth but some of them connected to issues talked about by our speakers. The affordable care act was explained in the report but also preached on my Dean Spooner. He talked about the logistics of it in the aspect of who is actually paying for healthcare and where all the industries money is going. Both touched on that aspect that with this act, there are going to be sacrifices made by the industry. This can be lack of care or lack of pay due to the sheer fact of if healthcare is going to be a free will, then that money needs to be compensated elsewhere. The report also talked about digital therapeutics and how it is the future of healthcare. Patients want their experience to be more mobile friendly in terms of having an app or online program that makes their treatment options more user friendly. Dean Spooner talked about how healthcare spending has drastically increased and most of it is due to this technological age. The US spends the most on its healthcare and 2/3 of it goes to technology such as this. Dean Welch also mentioned that these new technologies are causing issues as well as benefits. They are taking away jobs from professionals because of these programs are doing the work for the professionals. With artificial intelligence becoming so prominent, jobs are being lost. This can lead to the idea she talked bout where professions are becoming more complex and demanding with leads to a new mandated number of years of schooling to be finished in order to be able to perform their job. All of these changes in the industry are occurring in order to better the industry but like I said earlier, this comes with sacrifices that not many are going to want to take.
On Thursday, Dr. Kennedy gave us some information on the drug discovery process and how much really goes into it. The readings we had before hand all talked about how long and extensive the drug discovery process is. It can take up to fifteen years to get a drug from start to market and can cost millions of dollars in order to do so. In this day and age there is such a demand for new low cost drugs which pushed the need for clinical trials. The phases of the trials each have their own purpose in terms of safety, efficacy, and large scale production. Dr. Kennedy compared drugs to a yin-yang sign to prove the fact that us and the drugs work cohesively; the drugs can do stuff to us but we can also do stuff to them. Our bodies are complex and can do amazing things. They can completely destroy a drug but can also welcome it. In order for drugs to work our body has to absorb them, distribute them, metabolize them, and then get rid of them. It seems like a simple process but it is not. When you're taking an Advil you have tot remember that that drug went through years and years of testing in order to make sure the drug safely and effectively performed the needed task without having an adverse effect. The article centered around Alzheimer Disease pointed this out a lot when saying that in a ten year span, 244 molecules were put through trials and through the drug discovery process but only one survived. This nearly 99% failure rate shows that it is not as easy as you think. Some diseases are too complex for us to understand which can make it costly to try to understand. When going through the process you have to look at your patient as a target market. You have to see what their need is and how their demographics match up. Put yourself in their shoes, what would you want from a drug. You would want characteristics like easy administration, longer duration, not many administrations, and no adverse effects. This may seem like an easy check list but shaping a molecule and lead compound to carefully travel through the body and optimize effectiveness, but it is actually an extremely difficult concept. The process is struggling right now and the FDA is trying to find new ways to make it easier or more functioning. They introduce the Critical Pathway Initiative in order to do so. This program looks to help the industry in aspects such as development and utilization of bio-markers, modernization of clinical trial methods, use of bioinformatics, and improvement in manufacturing technologies. These improvements were needed due to genomics not being able to support drug discovery, industry business decisions, as well as regulatory requirements not being up to par or being too much. The industry is in need of some serious changes in many aspects and in order to do so everyone needs to be on the same page. This starts with the patients and the smallest professionals and leads all the way up to regulatory committees. The industry needs all hands on deck and all of the readings and speakers proved that.
On Tuesday we dove in deeper of what we read and learned the week before. We were assigned the readings "Next-generation member engagement during the care journey" and "Top health industry issues of 2019". These readings had things in common with one another as well as multiple connections to what our speakers last week talked about. The first article preached the idea that insurance companies need to get their members more involved. This is not a ploy for insurers to dive into the pockets of their customers but rather make a more efficient and effective relationship between the two. Members are making life altering decisions when it comes to health and most of the time they have no idea what the next step is. This is why they do little research and just listen the the suggestion of the first doctor they see. This is extremely detrimental to the member because they are not taking the most cost effective or health conscious route. Their lack of knowledge debilitates them, which is why insurers want to get more involve in order to help their members and make their lives easier. The approach to doing so is data mining. They want to understand their consumers better by collecting data on how they function digitally in order to provide them with the best route. Businesses do this all the time when they are trying to predict their consumers next move; they want to really know their consumer and how they function in order to give them the assistance they need. By individualizing their experience, insurance members feel more like a human then a number. I thought this connected to Dean Welch's talk about inter-professionalism which is an approach to making members of the health field more involved in the patient journey. The idea is to communicate more in order to make patients feel more safe and ultimately decrease the number of medical errors which is plaguing the industry. This idea and the article about insurers connect because they are both trying to better the journey of their consumers in order to better the industry in the end. This also connects to the patient central global payment system that Dean Welch talked about. When making members more collaborative in their insurance it is driving down costs for not only the members but the insurance company as well. This payment system is doing the same because it is trying to decrease costs for the hospital and patients by basing payment off of patient outcome; if it is a better outcome then pay will be better. This makes the patients time in the health field more effective since everyone is working together to better everyone daily experience. The second reading about the top health issues is pretty self explanatory within the title. The issues that were stated was implementing more digital therapeutics, making every individual count in the system, tax reforms, creating an affordable value line, private equity creeping up, and the affordable care act. All of these issues are important to the industry's growth but some of them connected to issues talked about by our speakers. The affordable care act was explained in the report but also preached on my Dean Spooner. He talked about the logistics of it in the aspect of who is actually paying for healthcare and where all the industries money is going. Both touched on that aspect that with this act, there are going to be sacrifices made by the industry. This can be lack of care or lack of pay due to the sheer fact of if healthcare is going to be a free will, then that money needs to be compensated elsewhere. The report also talked about digital therapeutics and how it is the future of healthcare. Patients want their experience to be more mobile friendly in terms of having an app or online program that makes their treatment options more user friendly. Dean Spooner talked about how healthcare spending has drastically increased and most of it is due to this technological age. The US spends the most on its healthcare and 2/3 of it goes to technology such as this. Dean Welch also mentioned that these new technologies are causing issues as well as benefits. They are taking away jobs from professionals because of these programs are doing the work for the professionals. With artificial intelligence becoming so prominent, jobs are being lost. This can lead to the idea she talked bout where professions are becoming more complex and demanding with leads to a new mandated number of years of schooling to be finished in order to be able to perform their job. All of these changes in the industry are occurring in order to better the industry but like I said earlier, this comes with sacrifices that not many are going to want to take.
On Thursday, Dr. Kennedy gave us some information on the drug discovery process and how much really goes into it. The readings we had before hand all talked about how long and extensive the drug discovery process is. It can take up to fifteen years to get a drug from start to market and can cost millions of dollars in order to do so. In this day and age there is such a demand for new low cost drugs which pushed the need for clinical trials. The phases of the trials each have their own purpose in terms of safety, efficacy, and large scale production. Dr. Kennedy compared drugs to a yin-yang sign to prove the fact that us and the drugs work cohesively; the drugs can do stuff to us but we can also do stuff to them. Our bodies are complex and can do amazing things. They can completely destroy a drug but can also welcome it. In order for drugs to work our body has to absorb them, distribute them, metabolize them, and then get rid of them. It seems like a simple process but it is not. When you're taking an Advil you have tot remember that that drug went through years and years of testing in order to make sure the drug safely and effectively performed the needed task without having an adverse effect. The article centered around Alzheimer Disease pointed this out a lot when saying that in a ten year span, 244 molecules were put through trials and through the drug discovery process but only one survived. This nearly 99% failure rate shows that it is not as easy as you think. Some diseases are too complex for us to understand which can make it costly to try to understand. When going through the process you have to look at your patient as a target market. You have to see what their need is and how their demographics match up. Put yourself in their shoes, what would you want from a drug. You would want characteristics like easy administration, longer duration, not many administrations, and no adverse effects. This may seem like an easy check list but shaping a molecule and lead compound to carefully travel through the body and optimize effectiveness, but it is actually an extremely difficult concept. The process is struggling right now and the FDA is trying to find new ways to make it easier or more functioning. They introduce the Critical Pathway Initiative in order to do so. This program looks to help the industry in aspects such as development and utilization of bio-markers, modernization of clinical trial methods, use of bioinformatics, and improvement in manufacturing technologies. These improvements were needed due to genomics not being able to support drug discovery, industry business decisions, as well as regulatory requirements not being up to par or being too much. The industry is in need of some serious changes in many aspects and in order to do so everyone needs to be on the same page. This starts with the patients and the smallest professionals and leads all the way up to regulatory committees. The industry needs all hands on deck and all of the readings and speakers proved that.
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