JDRF's Tom Robinson Explains How to Use the T1D Index

The Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) Index, which was launched in September, provides payers with a good foundation for value-based health care, said Tom Robinson, vice president of global access at JDRF.

Transcript

How can someone navigate the T1D Index?

The simplest thing is to just go to T1Dindex.org and look at the world map there, maybe compare a few countries that are of interest, and then dive into the one that you care most about. Then it takes you through the story of that country and how type 1 looks today—the growth story, the loss and the burden, and what can be done to address that burden. From there, if you want to go deeper, you can dive into the Lancet paper, or there's a dashboard tool, or the codebase is available open source. So there's a lot of layers to peel beyond that, but starting point is just that T1Dindex.org website.

What information can patients, providers, and payers gain from the T1D Index?

The index is this incredibly rich simulation of each country, but there are 3 main numbers that we draw out of it. The first is how many people are living with type 1. The second is how many people should be alive with type 1 if they received really good care. The third is how many healthy life-years are lost to the average person who develops type 1.

And then for each of those numbers, we also look at how interventions can improve care and change the numbers and change the story of type 1 in that country. And I think how you engage with that is really different depending on who you are. If you're a person living with type 1, you might dive into, "Oh, wow, each extra test trip could add 4 hours to my life. Maybe I'm going to think about marching into that local pharmacy and making sure they stock the test trips." For a provider, they might look at some of the incidence rates and ask, "Hey, are we catching everyone?" or look at the growth estimates and say, "Are we prepared for this? Do we need to think about evolving our model for this rapid growth in type 1?"

For a payer, government, or insurer, you've got some good foundations, frankly, for value-based health care in this model. You can bring your cost models, the epidemiology we've done, and then drop out things like dollars per life-year or get under the hood about complications modeling and look at lifetime health care costs and so forth. Some of this is readily available on the website, some you need to kind of start using the interactive tools to really get to grips with and get the full value out of, but there's a lot of depth behind that kind of initial public face.