Category: Resource Allocation

Save the Date, April 12-13, 2018! Diseases of Despair: The Role of Policy and Law

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Diseases of Despair imageDiseases of Despair: The Role of Policy and Law
April 12 – 13, 2018
Various locations – check agenda for details
Northeastern University, Boston, MA

Description

Anne Case and Angus Deaton shocked the world with their 2015 report that noted an increase in all-cause mortality among middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States. This pattern is not occurring in other groups within the United States and Europe. Their report, and others since then, have linked this trend to so-called deaths of despair (death from suicide, chronic substance use, and overdoses) and their linkage to other determinants of health (education, labor markets, marital patterns). A recent update to the report makes it clear that this trend is no longer limited to any particular geographic region within the United States.

This year’s NUSL Center for Health Policy and Law annual conference and associated scholarship will bring together experts, policymakers, and academics to discuss the causes behind such trends, and to explore potential political, policy, and legal responses for addressing broader determinants that affect the physical and mental health of Americans dying from these diseases of despair. Deeper examination into similar patterns among diverse populations, as well as analysis of continuing racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities, will be central to the discourse.

Read More

The CVS/Aetna Deal: The Promise in Data Integration

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Wendy Netter Epstein

Earlier this month, CVS announced plans to buy Aetna— one of the nation’s largest health insurers—in a $69 billion deal.  Aetna and CVS pitched the deal to the public largely on the promise of controlling costs and improving efficiency in their operations, which they say will inhere to the benefit of consumers. The media coverage since the announcement has largely focused on these claims, and in particular, on the question of whether this vertical integration will ultimately lower health care costs for consumers—or increase them.  There are both skeptics  and optimists.  A lot will turn on the effects of integrating Aetna’s insurance with CVS’s pharmacy benefit manager services.

But CVS and Aetna also flag another potential benefit that has garnered less media attention—the promise in combining their data.  CVS CEO Larry Merlo says that “[b]y integrating data across [their] enterprise assets and through the use of predictive analytics,” consumers (and patients) will be better off.  This claim merits more attention.  There are three key ways that Merlo might be right. Read More

Patient Safety at the Crossroads

John Tingle Leave a comment

By John Tingle

The NHS (National Health Service) in the UK is 70 next year: it was founded on 5th July 1948 and celebrations are being planned. Clearly a lot has changed since it was founded. Our concept of wellness has changed, we go to the doctor for reasons that would never have been considered appropriate in 1948. Health today is not just about the absence of physical diseases.

What is clear is that ever since 1948 the NHS has been shortage of resources in the face of a seemingly insatiable demand for its services. Balancing finite resources against near infinite demands is no easy task. Seventy years on, it is most concerning that a vast amount of money in the NHS is now being spent on clinical negligence claims. In their latest annual report and accounts, NHS Resolution estimates the total amount for clinical negligence claims it owes is £65 Billion. Damages paid to patients rose significantly from £950.4 million to £1,083.0 million, an increase of 14%. The high cost of clinical negligence is not sustainable and something must be urgently done to reduce the number of claims against the NHS. The issues were recently considered by the National Audit Office (NAO), which found:

  • The cost of clinical negligence claims is rising at a faster rate year-on-year, than NHS funding.
  • Even if successful, NHS Resolution and the Department’s current actions are unlikely to stop the growth in the cost of clinical negligence claims.
  • The government lacks a coherent cross-government strategy, underpinned by policy, to support measures to tackle the rising cost of clinical negligence.

Read More

First, Do No Harm: NGOs and Corporate Donations

cnicheileachai Leave a comment

By Clíodhna Ní Chéileachair

Last year Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) refused free vaccinations for pneumonia from Pfizer, who had offered the medicines as a corporate donation to the humanitarian organisation. The explanation MSF provided (available here) makes for an interesting, if uncomfortable read. Looming large is the lengthy history of negotiations between MSF with the only manufacturers of the vaccine, GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer. MSF claim that the only sustainable solution to a disease that claims the lives of almost a million children each year is an overall reduction in the cost of the vaccine, and not one-off donations that come with restrictions on where MSF may use the medicines, and a constant power disparity between the parties, where Pfizer may release the medication on their own timeline, and revoke access as they see fit.

Read More

Innovation and Intellectual Property Policies in European Research Infrastructure Consortia

Timo Minssen Leave a comment

By Timo Minssen

I am happy to announce the publication of our collaborative paper with Helen Yu and Jakob Wested on “Innovation and intellectual property policies in European Research Infrastructure Consortia (part I)” in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice (Oxford University Press). Taking the European Spallation Source ERIC as an example, our paper investigates ERIC Regulations and EU policies and discusses what issues and perspectives ERICs need to consider in their IPR policies to balance the core-objectives of multiple stakeholders and achieve sustainability in various research areas, including the health and life sciences.

The authors would like to express their special gratitude to Dr. Ohad Graber Soudry, Head of Legal, European Spallation Source ESS-ERIC in Lund, Sweden, for all his support and valuable comments. This paper is supported by the CoNeXT project (see https://conext.ku.dk/ last visited July 23, 2016) under the University of Copenhagen’s Excellence Program for Interdisciplinary Research.

Abstract:

Research and innovation are key pillars of the EU’s strategy to create sustainable growth and prosperity in Europe. Research infrastructures (RIs) are central instruments to implement this strategy. They bring together a wide diversity of expertise and interests to look for solutions to many of the problems society is facing today, including challenges in the health and life sciences. To facilitate the creation and operation of such RIs, the EU adopted legal frameworks for European Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERIC). On August 31, 2015, the European Spallation Source (ESS) was established as an ERIC. Under the ERIC Regulations and ESS Statutes, the European Spallation Source ERIC is required to adopt various policy documents relating to the operation and management of the facility. These cover a wide variety of issues such as user access, public procurement, intellectual property rights (IPR), data management, and dissemination. One of the main goals of the ESS policies is to ensure that the research environment at ESS is compatible with a wide variety of international users’ obligations to multiple stakeholder-interests. But how can these policies best be aligned with the EU objective to achieve economic growth and scientific excellence by encouraging international research collaborations? The complex relationship between scientific excellence, innovation, and IPRs must be carefully considered. Taking the European Spallation Source ERIC as an example, this article investigates ERIC Regulations and EU policies and discusses what issues and perspectives ERICs need to consider in their IPR policies to balance the core-objectives of multiple stakeholders and achieve sustainability. In Part II, we will analyze and compare the different IPR policies of the various ERICs in a subsequent article.

Undocumented Organ Transplants

bradsegal Leave a comment

By Brad Segal

Manuel—not his real name—was admitted to the hospital with decompensated heart failure. As a child he had scarlet fever which, left untreated, had caused the valves of his heart to calcify and stiffen. Over time, pumping against increased resistance, his heart’s contractions began to weaken until finally, they lost all synchrony and the normal function of his heart spiraled out of control. At this stage, his fate was tied to whether or not he would receive a new heart in time.

He was in his 30’s and had no other illnesses. From a medical perspective, Manuel was the ideal candidate for a cardiac transplant. But a decade ago Manuel crossed the United States border in pursuit of a better life. As an undocumented immigrant, he was ineligible for the insurance coverage necessary to pay for a heart transplant. After being thoroughly evaluated by the hospital’s transplant center, given his modest financial resources and inability to obtain new insurance coverage, Manuel was not placed on the waiting list for a new heart.

The average heart transplant costs about a million dollars to perform. Subsequent follow-up care adds another $30,000 annually. Health insurance will usually cover most, if not all, of these costs. But uninsured patients are kept off transplant lists on the grounds that the inability to pay for care allegedly jeopardizes an organ’s long-term success. Read More

“There are millions of people who are living below subsistence”: Black Panther Party Founder Bobby Seale as Public Health Activist

wendysalkin 3 Comments

By Wendy S. Salkin

Picture it: Tuesday, February 14, 2017. It is four o’clock and the Tsai Auditorium of the Center for Government and International Studies is packed to the gills, abuzz with energy. Harvard faculty, students, staff, and community members fill every seat, line the steps, and stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the back. They are turning would-be attendees away at the door. The occasion for such excitement is this: The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research here at Harvard hosted the event, “Bobby Seale in Conversation with Jim Sidanius.”

Jim Sidanius is the John Lindsley Professor of Psychology in memory of William James and of African and African American Studies. His work spans broadly across both decades and areas of inquiry. He and his co-author Felicia Pratto are famously responsible for formulating social dominance theory, “a general model of the development and maintenance of group-based social hierarchy and social oppression.” He has also pioneered work in other areas of political psychology, including such research areas as “political ideology and cognitive functioning, the political psychology of gender, group conflict, institutional discrimination and the evolutionary psychology of intergroup prejudice.”

And Bobby Seale, as you may know, co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPP). I had never before seen Bobby Seale speak and did not know what to expect. And, ultimately, I am pleased not to have watched any of his interviews in advance, as I was able to have the experience with fresh eyes. (It’s worth noting that many of his interviews and speeches are easily accessible on YouTube. It’s worth watching them, including his 2015 New York Times interview with R&B artist D’Angelo.) His energy and enthusiasm captivates his audience, as when, during his talk last week, he recited from the Declaration of Independence, and while so doing impersonated both John Wayne and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He recited this passage:

“[W]hen a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursu[ed] invariably…evinces a design to reduce [a people] under absolute Despotism, [then it is the] right [of the people]…to [alter and change that] Government, and [] provide new Guards for their future security.”

Read More

Chimeras with benefits? Transplants from bioengineered human/pig donors

bradsegal 2 Comments

By Brad Segal

In January of this year, Cell published a study modestly titled, Interspecies Chimerism with Mammalian Pluripotent Stem Cells. It reports success bioengineering a mostly-pig partly-human embryo. One day before, Nature published a report that scientists had grown (for lack of a better word) a functioning genetically-mouse pancreas within the body of a genetically-modified rat. The latest study raises the likelihood that before long, it will also be scientifically possible to grow human organs within bioengineered pigs.

The implications for transplantation are tremendous. But hold the applause for now. Imagine a chimera with a brain made up of human neurons which expressed human genes. Would organ procurement without consent be okay? That troubling possibility raises  questions about whether manufacturing chimeras with human-like properties for organs is even appropriate in the first place. Here’s what University of Montreal bioethicist Vardit Ravitsky told the Washington Post:

“I think the point of these papers is sort of a proof of principle, showing that what researchers intend to achieve with human-non-human chimeras might be possible … The more you can show that it stands to produce something that will actually save lives … the more we can demonstrate that the benefit is real, tangible and probable — overall it shifts the scale of risk-benefit assessment, potentially in favor of pursuing research and away from those concerns that are more philosophical and conceptual.”

I respectfully disagree. Saving more lives, of course, is good. Basic science is also valuable – even more so if it might translate to the bedside. This line of research, though, is positioned to upend our entire system of transplantation, and so its implications go beyond organ supply. In this post I will argue that to assess this technology’s implications for organ procurement in particular, there is good reason to focus on harms, not benefits. Read More

REGISTER NOW (1/23/17)! PFC’s 5th Annual Health Law Year in P/Review

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

p-review-logoHealth Law Year in P/Review
Featured Panel: The End of ObamaCare? Health Care Reform Under A New Administration
January 23, 2017 
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein West AB
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA
Register for this event

The Fifth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review symposium will feature leading experts discussing major developments during 2016 and what to watch out for in 2017. The discussion at this day-long event will cover hot topics in such areas as health policy under the new administration, regulatory issues in clinical research, law at the end-of-life, patient rights and advocacy, pharmaceutical policy, reproductive health, and public health law.

This year’s Health Law Year in P/Review is sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, Harvard Health Publications at Harvard Medical School, Health Affairs, the Hastings Center, the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, with support from the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund. 

Agenda Read More

Organs and Overdoses (Part II): ‘Higher risk’ donors

bradsegal Leave a comment

By Brad Segal

In my last post I characterized how overdoses from the surging opioid epidemic have become the fastest-growing cause of mortality among organ donors. In this update, I raise one potential consequence with ethical and policy implications: so-called donor-derived infections. To be clear, I focus primarily on organ recipients as deaths from drug overdose, and drug addiction more broadly, should be prevented regardless of any implications for transplantation. With this in mind, consider how the population of injection drug users shoulders a heavy burden of HIV, hepatitis B (HBV) and hepatitis C (HCV) (Table 1). First I will focus on screening guidelines, and then will move on to transplantation of organs known to carry an infection. table-1

Screening guidelines can help reduce the incidence of donor-derived infections, but the lab tests recommended in any policy must balance two potential concerns. First, lab tests have a rate of false negative results. Transplants of these organs will accidentally increase donor-derived infections. The policy question, then, is whether or not transplanting organs donated by individuals with higher risk of recent disease exposure will expose an unacceptable proportion of recipients to infection. This unintentional harm could undermine a duty of non-maleficence to organ recipients. Further complicating a potential screening policy is that the basic lab tests for HIV, HBV, and HCV detect the presence of human antibodies, which work well among a low-risk population, but antibodies might not appear in the blood until weeks after infection (Table 2).Recent infections are better detected by nucleic acid amplification (NAT) testing.To mitigate risk of infection,then, transplant screening policies should require a heightened level of surveillance among donors with a history of illicit drug use. Read More