#healthbeat Aaron Levie CEO Box Aneesh Chopra and Bib Kocher on stage at Healthbeat SF. pic.twitter.com/wsiIZozRge
— Missy Krasner (@missykras) October 27, 2014
There’s been lots of great commentary at Venture Beat’s HealthBeat conference here in San Francisco. Among the highlights was a thoroughly caffeinated panel discussion with Aneesh Chopra, the former chief technology officer for the White House and founder of Hunch Analytics.
Chopra insisted that payment reform and the attention to how things get paid for in healthcare will be the biggest drivers in the immediate term for advancements in both the delivery of care and for developing technology that can improve matters.
“To me a big driver of this is how we reimburse healthcare,” he said. “It’s going to take a little while for us to get in that direction” of revamping the fractured reimbursement models,, but its headed in the right direction. Fortunately, the technology will already be there. “It’s good to have the technology in place so that when we get there we can have it ready to go.”
Chopra also shared some insights on how the public sector, chiefly HHS and CMS, are embracing technological advancements, including giving patients and consumers much fuller access to their own medical record and holding accountable providers who don’t cooperate.
“I think we’re on the two-yard line,” he said. “We’ve established the law. Patients are allowed to have their own data; HIPAA reflects that. You can demand your data.” What needs to improve, he said, is how the data is delivered to the patient. “Right now, it’s clunky.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
And, significantly, providers can be fined $20,000 a day for withholding patients’ information if they’re asked, he said.
Also of significance is a highly likely forthcoming public API from CMS.
But he came repeatedly came back to the notion that fixing the world of healthcare payment would go a long way in helping address still significant barriers in the health system.
“Payment reform is the most powerful policy weapon,” he said
