Article
Balancing Value, Pathways, and Innovation in Healthcare
As specialty drug costs, formulary wars, and reimbursement models grab headlines everyday, we need to take a step back and visualize how all of this might impact innovation and whether the patient stands to lose in the process.
Powerful clinical decision support tools harnessing the potential of big data analytics may make it easier for physicians to set their patients on a standardized road to improvement, but the expansion of pre-approved, packed care may be doing more than just lowering costs. In places where bundled payments based on holistic episodes of care has taken root, these evidence-based, standardized clinical pathways may be having a negative impact on innovation and experimentation that can help those patients that fall outside of treatment methods that receive a payer stamp of approval.
While precision medicine, genomics, and personalized care are becoming big talking points in the research community, is the trend towards financial rewards for a relatively narrow band of evidence-based medicine limiting discovery by making less common treatments too expensive to use routinely?
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