In our latest BrightInsight Digital Health C-Suite Series episode Meghan Thelen, Senior Director, Value-Based Healthcare at bioMérieux, chats with us about how digital can unlock value in diagnostics through automation, clinical decision support tools, and by bringing together disparate data sources. We also discuss BrightInsight’s partnership with bioMérieux. You can watch the discussion below. or read on for a recap.
Diagnostics play a critical role in value-based healthcare. One primary objective of value-based healthcare is delivering better patient outcomes at a lower total cost of care. “We also think of how to be stewards of healthcare resources, providing more personalized care to patients, but at the same time ensure equitable access to care. Diagnostics can support these objectives,” Meghan says. Diagnostics can help patients get treated quickly, appropriately, and moved out of higher acuity settings of care as fast as possible.
Diagnostics also have unique characteristics that differentiate this market from pharma or a medical device. When thinking of a diagnostic platform, there's this difference between the value within the manufacturer’s control, including how quickly a test can turn around a result, the sensitivity and specificity of its performance, and the ease of use or robustness of the system.
When thinking about transformation towards value-based healthcare and the impact of an innovation on patients and their outcomes, these describe a more downstream impact. An intervening, human force is required, while a device or pharma has immediate impact on a patient. With a diagnostic test, a caregiver or medical provider must intervene and make a treatment decision based on the results. “That creates complexity in the business model, and that's where I spend a lot of my time thinking – how do we maximize the value that is created, this potential value created by our diagnostic technology in terms of making sure patients are managed optimally by clinicians?”
Two critical challenges exist in the diagnostic industry. The first is capturing downstream value, this indirectness of the value proposition of a test and its impact on patient outcomes. The second involves disparate data sources.
“When we're making a value analysis decision, and this matters both for value-based healthcare outcomes, market access decisions and commercial performance, the value calculation, you need access to data that comes from different silos in the healthcare system. There is test result data that comes from instruments, and that's usually housed in one data universe, the lab information system. Then, the patient outcome information is usually in the EHR systems, your Epic and Cerner. The challenge is aggregating this data in a meaningful, accurate, secure, actionable way,” she says.
Digital is core in terms of solving these issues. “Digital solutions are critical to advancing the full realization of the value of diagnostics.”
bioMérieux has tried to tackle this problem several different ways. “We have a strong medical affairs organization that uses scientific studies to look at outcomes, and data and digital tools are incredibly helpful for making those activities more cost effective and deployable at scale,” Meghan says.
“We also look at other kinds of solutions to bring tools to our customers, including clinical decision support software. These are capabilities that help clinicians leverage insights and deliver better and more standardized care. We investigate internal partnerships with experts that can bolster our skill sets and help us bring new ways of working with our customers. There's huge potential. We've just really scratched the surface with digital.”
Value capture is an area of immediate opportunity for digital, and there are others, Meghan says. Connectivity is another place that can benefit from digital, leveraging the cloud to capture instrument level data and aggregate that at massive scale globally. Also, there is continued opportunity for investment in automation capabilities in diagnostic medicine, along with clinical decision support tools that can be leveraged by clinicians in the healthcare setting to make better and more consistent care management decisions.
In 2022, bioMérieux entered into a global strategic partnership with BrightInsight, leveraging the diagnostic company’s strengths and filling any gaps. “I am very proud of the partnership that we have with BrightInsight. We have an aligned commitment to coming up with innovative solutions that solve immediate needs for healthcare providers. We also have an interesting way of partnering,” she says. “Rather than a strict build from within or buy, we really have a true collaborative partnership that leverages the strengths of both organizations to develop a disease management solution that will be hosted and deployed on the BrightInsight platform.”
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