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May 12, 2016
Digital health news update: Merger mania; advertising’s existential dillema
- Walgreens is expanding its telehealth deal with MDLive to cover behavioral therapy virtual visits as part of a broader mental health offering. Fortune notes that it “gives Walgreens an important touchpoint with payers, providers and patients: drug adherence.”
- Fitbit CEO James Park told investors and analysts that the company is looking to go deeper on healthcare applications for its wearables, and hinted that they’ll look into use cases that would take them to the FDA. “We are learning that lack of consumer engagement is a critical missing element in many broad healthcare efforts such as population health and disease management,” he quipped.
- Apple and IBM are partnering with Valeant’s Bausch + Lomb eyecare unit to develop a custom cataract extraction mobile app for opthalmologists. It’s part of a broader b2b app-development alliance between Apple, IBM and SAP.
- Pfizer has launched the first Facebook-only ad campaign from pharma we’ve heard of, for their OTC heartburn treatment Nexium 24HR. The series stars sock puppets and reportedly uses some new technology called humor, possibly also a first for pharma.
- The Times asks: What even is an ad anymore, in the age of sponsored/branded content, epidemic ad blocking and “what are essentially internal ad agencies” at media companies?
- As audience engagement increasingly becomes marketing’s true north, digital publishers are offering advertisers packages where they pay based on the amount of time an ad was viewed, rather than the traditional crude per-click metering.
- Advertisers and publishers are giddy about the promise of VR storytelling.
- Big investors to pharma: You need to get ahead of the pricing debate before Congress decides it for you. And I’ll add to that that as a speaker at last week’s Transforming Healthcare conference noted, all three remaining presidential candidates are in agreement that Medicare should negotiate drug prices directly with manufacturers.
- Clinton now favors opening Medicare up to more Americans, say those 50 and up – a “Medicare for more” scheme to parry her Democratic rival’s “Medicare-for-all” platform. Such a move would give CMS a lot more leverage in setting drug prices, whether directly or indirectly.
- Meanwhile, expect big premium hikes on ACA insurance plans – and a deafening political hullabaloo over what it means for the program – this year.
- Cigna announced that it has won value-based pricing contracts for both of the pricey new PCSK9 cholesterol-lowering drugs on the market – Sanofi/Regeneron’s Praluent and Amgen’s Repatha. The pharmas will take a haircut on patients whose LDL reduction does not meet or exceed targets based on clinical trials – on top of preexisting discounts on the drugs’ $14K+ price tags.
- It’s M&A May merger mania! IMS Health is absorbing Quintiles in a $9 billion stock swap. The deal offers prescription data hegemon IMS a world-class contract research organization and associated clinical trials services, along with a contract sales org. It also complements IMS’s Rx data offering with a trove of real world evidence to be gleaned from Quintiles’ clinical trials business, potentially setting the company up to compete with IBM’s Watson. The merged business will be called Quintiles IMS.
- And there were several big moves in pharma M&A recently. First, Abbott announced that it would buy CV device firm St. Jude Medical for $25 billion. Then Sanofi made a play for oncology specialist Medivation, which makes prostate cancer treatment Xtandi. The French firm’s initial offer, worth $9.3 billion, was rebuffed. Finally, Abbvie announced plans to buy another oncology specialist, Stemcentryx, for $5.8 billion.
- Apple is weighing a paid search option for its App Store. That might help apps struggling for adoption in the impossibly cluttered health and medical app spaces. Meanwhile, MIT spin-off Hacking Medicine Institute has a health app review site, Ranked Health, up.
- Clinical trials are the next frontier of digital patient engagement, and this is why real world evidence is becoming the buzzword du jour: “Clinical trial research often ignores objective measures about participants’ quality of life and instead relies on subjective data collected in surveys. Today’s mobile technologies let researchers continuously collect consistent, reliable, objective information about things that are meaningful to participants, such as the quality of their sleep or their ability to walk through the grocery store without fatigue.”
- The team behind Siri has developed a smarter voice activated virtual assistant, Viv, to usher us into the age of chatbots.
- Allergan ran a successful EHR outreach effort for their hospital antibiotic Dalvance, achieving a 28% engagement rate with physicians across 320 hospital targets in the first month of a six-month campaign.
- Behind Nestle’s entry into the health and healthcare space: concern that Big Food is becoming the next Big Tobacco, and a flight into medicine.
- GSK’s new chief has some interesting things to say on the pivots to value and digital.
- FDA is looking into how “intrinsic and extrinsic cues,” i.e., product attributes like shape, brand name and price, can influence perceptions of product quality in the absence of objective quality information.
- Boom! Interpublic Group shifts $250m in TV spend to YouTube. The Google unit has been gunning for a bigger share of TV advertisers’ spending, and it looks like they’re getting it.
- Health transparency tools are supposed to level the playing field on pricing and make healthcare consumers savvier shoppers. Unfortunately, even when they’re available, nobody seems to use them. That’s the upshot of a study published in JAMA that found only 10% of the 150,000 employees followed ever logged onto the website over the course of a year.
- The Washington Post has a profile of Stupid Cancer, the irreverent patient community for Millennials with cancer.
- Facebook’s founder has ambitions not only to wall off all the online publishing but also to cure all diseases.
- If you haven’t checked out my colleague Kelly’s post on our new physician data, take a look – juicy stuff on how physicians are navigating the shift from volume to value, where they’re spending their time online and how pharma might support telehealth.
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