1. AIA Vitality Life Insurance
2. Data Driven Healthcare Quality Markets
3. Abu Dhabi Health Authority – Weqaya
Vitality Institute Commission – Recommendation 3 http://thevitalityinstitute.org/commission/create-markets-for-health/
“The main thing here is for people to recognize that what we’re doing is creating the foundations of the future in a very fundamental way.
I mean we’re building the future that we all might want or all might not want, depending on our current vested interests.
I think it takes a really crummy ancestor to want to maintain his current business model at the expense of his descendant’s ability to understand the world around them.
And if you really want to figure out which side you’re on, ask yourself what’s going to make you a better ancestor?
John Perry Barlow
Co-founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Interviewed in the feature documentary “Downloaded” aired on SBS.
Vitality absolutely smash it across the board…
Must get on to these guys…..
PDF: Vitality_Recommendations2014_Report
PDF: InvestingInPrevention_Slides
Presentation: https://goto.webcasts.com/viewer/event.jsp?ei=1034543 (email: blackfriar@gmail.com)
From Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2014/06/18/how-corporate-america-could-save-300-billion-by-measuring-health-like-financial-performance/
Bruce Japsen, Contributor
I write about health care and policies from the president’s hometown
The U.S. could save more than $300 billion annually if employers adopted strategies that promoted health, prevention of chronic disease and measured progress of “working-age” individuals like they did their financial performance, according to a new report.
The analysis, developed by some well-known public health advocates brought together and funded by The Vitality Institute, said employers could save $217 billion to $303 billion annually, or 5 to 7 percent of total U.S. annual health spending by 2023, by adopting strategies to help Americans head off “non-communicable” diseases like cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular and respiratory issues as well as mental health.
To improve, the report’s authors say companies should be reporting health metrics like BMI and other employee health statuses just like they regularly report earnings and how an increasing number of companies report sustainability. Corporations should be required to integrate health metrics into their annual reporting by 2025, the Vitality Institute said. A link to the entire report and its recommendations is here.
“Companies should consider the health of their employees as one of their greatest assets,” said Derek Yach, executive director of the Vitality Institute, a New York-based organization funded by South Africa’s largest health insurance company, Discovery Limited.
Those involved in the report say its recommendations come at a time the Affordable Care Act and employers emphasize wellness as a way to improve quality and reduce costs.
“Healthy workers are more productive, resulting in improved financial performance,” Yach said. “We’re calling on corporations to take accountability and start reporting health metrics in their financial and sustainability reports. We believe this will positively impact the health of both employees and the corporate bottom line.”
The Institute brought together a commission linked here that includes some executives from the health care industry and others who work in academia and business. Commissioners came from Microsoft (MSFT); the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; drug and medical device giant Johnson & Johnson (JNJ); health insurer Humana (HUM); and the U.S. Department of Health and Humana Services.
The Vitality Institute said up to 80 percent of non-communicable diseases can be prevented through existing “evidence-based methods” and its report encourages the nation’s policymakers and legislative leaders to increase federal spending on prevention science at least 10 percent by 2017.
“Preventable chronic diseases such as lung cancer, diabetes and heart disease are forcing large numbers of people to exit the workforce prematurely due to their own poor health or to care for sick relatives,” said William Rosenzweig, chair of the Vitality Institute Commission and an executive at Physic Ventures, which invests in health and sustainability projects. “Yet private employers spend less than two percent of their total health budgets on prevention. This trend will stifle America’s economic growth for decades to come unless health is embraced as a core value in society.”
Attended the AFR Round Table on big data in healthcare today. In a spirited showing, I coined the term “data curious”…
usage: we need a health system that is more data curious
It received broader approval from the round table.
in an information free health market, prices are set by how much doctors think they’re worth, not how good they actually are, let alone how well the treatments they provide work.
This must stop.
I’ve been banging on (mainly to myself) for a while now about how its the bureaucrats that run government, not the politicians. In that most epic of Yes Prime Minister (2013) observations, the politicians are the publicly-elected marketing and communications arm of an unrepresentative, authoritarian regime, rarely exposed to sunlight.
It has been clear from reports that Liberal Politicians thought they knew a thing or two about how to run the country. They initiated the Commission of Audit, they then took the axe to an array of programs, and have consequently upset many sections in the community.
I’m arguing here that this is what happens when you let your marketing and communications arm run things. It looks tatty, disorganised and stupid.
If nothing else, bureaucracies are risk-averse and detail-oriented and particularly good at spotting problems before they arise, often to the point where nothing much happens at all.
What we’ve got now is a rabble.
so we established yesterday that change on it’s own does not inoculate against tyranny.
but at jen’s urging, I’ve taken the next step to:
stasis is tyranny
Email from me to Anne-marie regarding PHI and Commission of Audit ideas…
Thanks Anne-marie… last week was so busy, but at least it was a good busy, filled as it was with so many excellent events and conversations, quite often featuring you! Glad to hear that the club delivered on expectations… maybe Steve will be up for some insurrection? Or maybe not.
[the following early morning rant is off-the-record on account of my current employment and it still being a bit rough, but am happy to explore it further with you as required J]
On the modelling question, that’s more on the economic modelling side – something we’re tooling up for with Federico Girosi and Jane Hall, but haven’t quite started on. Ian McAuley and John Menadue have been presenting solid thinking about PHI for a while and would be worthwhile speaking with, particularly if you were looking to confirm your suspicions? Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone who could actually back-in the COA’s assumptions, as I’ve never heard anyone credible (with the potential exception of Paul Gross – though unsure how credible he is) put forward that point of view, mainly because it is ideologically driven, rather than evidence based. Indeed, the closer I get to the PHI data, the PHI businesses and the people who run them, the more certain I am that PHI can only ever be inflationary – especially when positioned as a duplication of a public insurance scheme (as per that graph from the SMH that Jim Gillespie spoke to at the event last week), as it allows clinicians to select whichever system suits their interests best, making them the customer rather than the patient.
My back-of-envelope rationale:
PHIs market themselves as honest brokers in the health system, but in reality, benefit directly from health inflation, acting as hemi-bureaucracies which take a 13% clip of disbursements that pass through them. In Australia, this dynamic is emphasised by their mutual structure, as the lack of profit motive leads to a lack of interest in containing anyone’s costs, especially when the Minister mandates premium increases based on demonstration of increased costs!!?? The smaller PHIs have no market power, so aim to please hospitals and doctors, thus making providers the customers, rather than their patients. This all has the effect of distancing patients from value the market generates, despite the fact they are the ones who fund it. I can’t think of a more diabolical arrangement than the one we’ve got. I’m disappointed that conservatives are willing to trade this downside for the illusory benefits of choice (which don’t actually exist because the basis on which we might choose are health service have nothing to do with the quality of that service). In reality, the choice argument is just a smoke screen for queue jumping, something conservatives aren’t to keen on when it came to asylum seeker policy.
As a footnote, it’s interesting to see the behaviour of the non-mutual PHIs – Medibank and NIB. They tend to be far more innovative and disruptive towards conventional health service models, mainly in an attempt to position themselves as the customers served by doctors and hospitals, while still being funded by their members. Unfortunately, their business model still ultimately relies on cost containment AND premium growth, and so also ends up also being inflationary – the main reason the US is the situation it’s in.
Wrapping the diatribe up, ideally a health market should be singularly focused on improving the health of the population that funds it. I’d estimate the current ranking of value captured by various actors looks something like this:
Under the previous administration, it probably looked more like this:
Ultimately, all forms of private health insurance make the providers the customers while the population carries the can. Interventions which position the population as customers should be the preference. Medicare was a big, necessary but not sufficient step in that direction.
I reckon some of this can inform some interesting health market design that could support a far more advanced and efficient health system. We’ve previously discussed that we’ve got 6 years to bring this to maturity, though if things keep tracking like they have been, it could be sooner.
Let me know your thoughts?
Cheers, Paul
From: Anne-Marie Boxall [mailto:ABoxall@ahha.asn.au]
Sent: Monday, 5 May 2014 6:08 PM
To: Paul Nicolarakis (paul.nicolarakis@outlook.com)
Subject: Modelling
No, not the fashion kind (although I am sure you would be great).
A curiosity question – are you and your people able to model something along the lines of the means-tested Medicare scheme proposed by the Commission of Audit? Not sure what data you have, or what is needed to model such a proposal, but it strikes me that the idea rests heavily on the assumption that a market for health insurance would drive down health costs (hospital and primary care and therefore premiums prices). Not quite sure what evidence underpins this assumption (other than economic theory) as Fraser era experiment suggests that it would not work. Just wondering….
Hope you made it to your many subsequent events last week. Dinner at the gentleman’s club was interesting. I think they might also have an age criteria for membership there. 70 plus only.
Regards,
Am
Dr Anne-marie Boxall
Director, The Deeble Institute for Health Policy Research
Managing Editor, Australian Health Review
Australian Healthcare & Hospitals Association
the voice of public healthcare
T: 02 6162 0780 | F: 02 6162 0779
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E:aboxall@ahha.asn.au
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Its not about finding businesses that profit from advertising that they make you healthy and/or long lived, its about businesses that make money from you being healthy and/or long lived.
This is how we underpin a prevention business.
OUCH!!!
Who said that???
Health systems exist for two main reasons: To make money. To get re-elected.
That said, it is probably why most things exist.