CHIDS

Having already been a third party vendor for health care products over the past decade, Amazon is considering expanding its scale of distribution in health care industry.  From online bookstore to a behemoth commerce company, Amazon has the consumer market necessary for such a jump.  But what are the implications for other distributors of medical supplies?  

Amazon’s brazen introduction into the field could awaken increased competition among other distributors, something that would bring costs down and encourage innovation.  The intricacies of health care as an industry are complex, and may take a long time for any new challenger to overcome, but the logistics and infrastructure are already in place for Amazon.  

Through the rapidly expanding initiative called Amazon Business, a wide selection of medical supplies, from sutures to beds, have been made available over the past year.  According to Amazon executives, Amazon Business has generated roughly $1 billion in sales and is poised for continued growth.  In a February 2016 report, the US was estimated to have an annual 4.2% increase in the sale of disposable medical supplies, raising the market to $54.1 billion by 2020.  Groundbreaking research has lead to the creation of new products based on improved materials and designs that will benefit growth.  However, many of these developments in minimally invasive and noninvasive techniques will reduce the need for disposable medical supplies. This shifts the balance of funding from replaceable materials to permanent equipment.  Capitalizing on this, Amazon has also made moves into the pharmaceutical industry, recently hiring health care experts and listing job openings for similar positions.  Will the next evolution of health care be labelled with Amazon Prime?

Further Reading:

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/search?base_query=healthcare&loc_query=&job_count=10&result_limit=10&sort=relevant&cache

http://www.reportlinker.com/p03713480/Disposable-Medical-Supplies-US-Industry-Study-with-Forecasts-for.html

http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20170424/NEWS/170429944/becton-dickinson-will-pay-24-billion-to-purchase-another-medical

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4080373-80-million-prime-subscribers-ready-amazons-pharmacy

With the advent of the iPhone, mobile medical applications have increased in use for both patients and consumers.  Companies capitalize on the relative cheapness of iOS development to build platforms around mobile health and fitness, and a plethora of these apps are available on the market now.  Catchphrases such as “scientifically proven” and “medically tested” abound in many of these consumer marketed applications, but oftentimes the evidence to back up these claims are absent.  Regulation and accountability of the mobile world has become somewhat of a grey zone in terms of who should control the screening and vetting process.  Federal departments, such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), have historically limited their jurisdiction to specific medical topics.  This begs the question: who is responsible for this regulation?    

Recently, state regulators have started investigating the claims of many fitness and health applications to ascertain their correctness.  The Office of the Attorney General of New York (NYOAG) has cracked down on many of the heart rate monitoring apps and the marketing claims they have promoted.  One such application is Cardiio, a heart rate monitor that advertised to “measure your heart rate, learn how the numbers relate to your general wellness, perform effective workouts to get in shape, and track your progress” in addition to calculating life expectancy based on heart rate.  The NYOAG found that Cardiio, Inc.’s assertions that Cardiio-Heart Rate Monitor can calculate a user’s potential life expectancy and estimate how the user “stacks up” against “the average person” in the USA did not contain sufficient disclosures that these calculations were hypothetical and estimates not intended to measure accurately life expectancy.  As a result of the investigation, many changes were made to the original application to notify users that the data was not always accurate.  The emboldened tag, “The Cardiio app has not been tested with individuals with health conditions…and has not been cleared or approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration” is a reminder to be wary of the advertised benefits of healthcare apps.   

An important outcome of the recent claims settled was the methods used to categorize the variety of medical applications in the app store.  Medical devices are separated into classes by the FDA, ranging from low risk Class I devices such as dental floss, to higher risk Class III apparatus such as a heart replacement valve.  Many medical mobile applications have been moved from Class I to Class II, representing a greater amount of regulation and control.  While mobile applications provide a faster and more adaptable method of healthcare support, we should be aware of the evidence necessary to show their effectiveness and safety.

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Sources:

https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/new-york-attorney-general-settles-claims-against-three-health-apps

Assurance of Discontinuance with Cardiio, Inc.

https://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/ResourcesforYou/Industry/ucm353513.htm

https://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/Transparency/Basics/ucm194438.htm

Who is the keynote speaker at WHITE 2016? Thought you would never ask!

This year’s keynote speaker at WHITE 2016 is Dr. Lisa Simpson. Dr. Simpson is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Academy Health.  Having over 80 publications in scholarly journals, her research focuses on improving the performance of the health care system. Here are 4 interesting facts about Dr. Simpson.

1. Keynote address at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) Medicaid/CHIP Quality Conference
2. Winner of the 2010 Public Policy and Advocacy award!
3. Published Health Plan Quality Improvement Strategy Under the Affordable Care Act
4. Served as the Deputy Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Dr. Simpson makes a powerful impact in the area of health policy and system response to childhood obesity.    She also currently serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of Comparative Effectiveness Research, Healthcare. We are honored to have Dr. Simpson serve as the keynote at WHITE 2016 on Friday, October 21 and look forward to her talk!

We hope to see you at WHITE 2016 at the Westin hotel, Alexandria, VA.

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Reference: http://www.healthandsocietyscholars.org/media/file/Simpson_Lisa.pdf