The Harvard Forum on Health Care Innovation, a joint collaboration between Harvard Business School and Harvard Medical School, was recently held in Cambridge, Mass, on April 15-16, 2015. This private, invitation-only event assembled an elite group that included HBS and HMS alumni and faculty, as well as other key opinion leaders in healthcare. Cara Sterling, Director of HBS’s Health Care Initiative, who organized the event, shared that the goal for the event was to provide an opportunity for “people from different sectors to come together and talk freely” in order to “spur innovation in healthcare.”
One key aspect of the event was the introduction of the HBS-HMS Health Acceleration Challenge finalists, a contest that was launched to seek innovative, early-stage healthcare ventures that have great potential for transforming healthcare.
Out of a total of 478 applicants, 18 were selected as semi-finalists; from those, four of the brightest were chosen as finalists to share a $150,000 Cox Prize. They’ll also have an HBS case study written about them, and each team presented and received feedback at this year’s Forum. The final winner will be decided in a year’s time, by identifying the startup venture that is most successful in disseminating and scaling their healthcare solution.
Look out for the great work of these four finalists in the coming year:
- Bloodbuy is a startup that aims to improve the efficiency and price transparency of the blood supply market by matching blood centers and hospitals through an online, cloud-based platform. In a pilot program, this system was found to decrease hospital costs by 23% while also decreasing the risk of blood shortages and the waste of blood products.
- The I-Pass Patient Handoff Program is a training curriculum developed by six Boston Children’s clinicians to improve the exchange of patient information between providers that occurs at the change of a shift. A research study of this intervention, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that use of I-Pass led to an impressive 30% reduction in medical errors.
- Medalogix is a predictive analytics company that has created a product to that can assist those in the post-acute care sector to better identify hospice-eligible patients. Through working with Medalogix, clients have been able to successfully increase transfers to hospice from home health care and decrease the number of live discharges from hospice.
- Twine Health is a startup that has created a cloud-based, collaborative care platform of the same name that enables providers to partner with their patients through coaches to provide seamless care and support for the management of chronic disease. In a recent clinical trial, Twine more efficiently helped patients achieve blood pressure control, which resulted in cost-savings (versus the traditional model of care).
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In addition to the Health Acceleration Challenge finalists, there was also an impressive line-up of healthcare experts that shared their thoughts throughout the two days in keynotes and panel discussions. Below are some of the highlights:
Value in Healthcare
Speaker Peter Orszag, Vice Chairman of Corporate and Investment Banking and Chairman of the Financial Strategy and Solutions Group at Citigroup, discussed three major structural forces that he feels will have a major affect on healthcare quality and spending, including the shift to value based payments, digitization of healthcare, and the increased role of the consumer in healthcare spending. He also discussed three big unknowns and their future impact on the heathcare cost curve, namely: future policy changes, increasing consolidation of the healthcare market, and emerging healthcare innovation.
A Blueprint for the Future
Mark Bertolini, Chairman and CEO of Aetna, gave a keynote speech entitled “A Blueprint for a 21st Century Health Care System” in which he highlighted five key measures that hold promise to improve healthcare:
- System re-design that enables lower cost, higher quality care with increased access
- Sophisticated health IT systems
- Care optimization, especially to coordinate care for the 5 percent for whom most healthcare dollars are spent
- Aligning economic incentives with healthcare goals
- Increased patient engagement.
Employers as Innovators
In an engaging panel discussion, moderator Bryan Roberts, Partner at Venrock, discussed the growing role of “employers as innovators” with expert panel members Ellen Exum, Director of Benefits/Global Design and Strategy at IBM; Adam Jackson, CEO and Cofounder of Doctor on Demand; Brian Marocotte, CEO and President of the National Business Group on Health; and Derek Newell, CEO of Jiff.
There was a robust discussion regarding the use of wearables and other tools as part of wellness programs to increase engagement and compliance, and to hopefully improve outcomes. One example was Adam Jackson’s Doctor on Demand which, for $40 per telehealth visit, has been found to decrease costs, decrease absenteeism, and increase productivity and morale.
Focus on Neurologic Disease
In a discussion with William Sahlman, Professor of Business Administration at HBS, Deborah Dunsire, MD, President and CEO of FORUM Pharmaceuticals shared her company’s mission of tackling neurological disease. Costs to society due to neurologic disease are great, she argued, not just in terms of direct costs, but also indirect costs – and there should be increased focus in developing treatments for these disorders. One significant challenge is the lack of mental health advocacy, which is an obstacle to obtaining funding for research.
The “Retail-ization” of Healthcare
Speaker Helena Foulkes, President of CVS/Pharmacy and Executive VP of CVS Health, shared the key factors that she feels are driving the “retail-ization” of healthcare:
- Excessive spending on chronic disease
- Increasing number of baby boomers on Medicare
- Rising use of the internet to research health information online
- Growing numbers of employers with high deductible plans.
She also shared the initiatives that CVS has begun to help tackle these problems, which include drug adherence programs, a focus on patients with the greatest needs, and integrating digital tools.
Watson Will See You Now
Speaker Mark Megerian, Senior Tech Staff Member at IBM Watson Solutions, shared the exciting (and for some, frightening) prospect of using machine learning and predictive analytics to make clinical recommendations via IBM’s Watson program.
Trained at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK), Watson has been shown to be capable of making recommendations similar to MSK oncologists, with 97 percent accuracy, for breast, colon, rectal, and lung cancers. They are now scaling to include other types of cancers and also to involve other organizations.
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Closing remarks were given by Dr. Jeffrey Flier, Dean of HMS, who shared that he feels healthcare delivery innovation has been sorely lacking, and that HMS and HBS are now deeply committed to medicine and entrepreneurship. Harvard hopes to lead healthcare innovation in the future. From the look of this year’s very promising Health Acceleration Challenge finalists, it seems his wish is likely to come true.
