Category: Innovation and Incentives in Digital Health

illustration of person tracking his health condition with smart bracelet, mobile application and cloud services.

Reforming How Medicare Pays for Digital Health

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Robert Horne and Lucia Savage

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, also known as the digital revolution, leverages technology to blur the lines between products and services. In the health insurance sector, this revolution offers policymakers unique opportunities to improve coverage and payment efficiencies while providing meaningful benefits to beneficiaries.

Medicare could lead this charge. Congress has an opportunity to reform Medicare in 2024, when the Trust Fund will become insolvent. Policymakers expect Congress to address this problem legislatively to prevent interruptions in coverage for seniors.

If past behavior is any indication, the legislation will also include reforms to improve how the program operates and spends money. Reforms to Medicare’s traditional coverage and reimbursement approaches that harness the digital revolution can help the program secure additional value. We know this because other sectors of the U.S. economy that have fully embraced this revolution have realized additional value.

Read More

Doctor working with modern computer interface.

To Set the Price Tag for Telehealth, First Understand Its Value

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Mary Witkowski, Susanna Gallani, and David N. Bernstein

As the economy reopens, a debate has emerged about whether to continue supporting telehealth and digital practices, or whether to return to pre-pandemic practices, practically relegating telehealth solutions and digital interactions to lower-value exceptions to traditional medical care.

The next set of regulatory and payment policies will likely set the trajectory for how digital health is integrated into the overall care model. We suggest that rather than making these policy decisions based on incremental thinking relative to historical pricing of in-person care, they ought to be based on an assessment of how they generate value for patients.

Read More

Burgess Hill, West Sussex – 12 January, 2021 Covid-19 home PCR self-test kit.

Pandemic Diagnostics: Present and Future Implications of Self-Testing Reimbursement

David Simon Leave a comment

By David A. Simon

The process of diagnosing a disease or condition, including detection of SARS-CoV-2 infection, is changing.

Consumers now can not only collect their specimen from their living room couch, but they can test it while watching Netflix. Sampling, testing, and obtaining results all can be done in a patient’s home.

For communicable diseases like COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection, at-home testing has considerable public health benefits. In addition to being more convenient than traditional diagnostics, self-testing can substantially reduce or eliminate the risk that infected individuals will spread the virus en route to a testing site.

This innovation has been spurred, in part, by a powerful incentive: the federal government has all-but guaranteed reimbursement for these tests.

Read More

Illustration of multicolored profiles. An overlay of strings of ones and zeroes is visible

We Need to Do More with Hospitals’ Data, But There Are Better Ways

wepstein Leave a comment

By Wendy Netter Epstein and Charlotte Tschider

This May, Google announced a new partnership with national hospital chain HCA Healthcare to consolidate HCA’s digital health data from electronic medical records and medical devices and store it in Google Cloud.

This move is the just the latest of a growing trend — in the first half of this year alone, there have been at least 38 partnerships announced between providers and big tech. Health systems are hoping to leverage the know-how of tech titans to unlock the potential of their treasure troves of data.

Health systems have faltered in achieving this on their own, facing, on the one hand, technical and practical challenges, and, on the other, political and ethical concerns.

Read More