Employers Are the Big Fish, but They’re Not Biting

Employers Are the Big Fish, but They’re Not Biting

I follow a pretty diverse mix of voices in the Blogosphere to wrap my head around all the moving parts with innovation in the healthcare space. @VentureValkyrie is always entertaining and offers a great view into investments in healthcare innovation. A recent post discussed a real dilemma faced by innovators in the healthcare space. Employers are struggling with healthcare costs that are on a runaway growth curve. You might think that means that these large employers and payers have an appetite for many innovations, but the observations from @VentureValkyrie is that they really only have the bandwidth to target a few big ticket issues:

"The employers in the room made it clear that diabetes, cardiology and spine costs are the 3 horsemen of the health benefits apocalypse and that everything else was pretty much beyond their ability to think about."

Several studies have documented the impact on workplace absenteeism for adult caregivers who are struggling to help parents deal with a myriad of issues. I believe that innovation in the aging market could really help adult care givers and reduce the workplace impact on employers who almost certainly all have a growing percentage of employees that must take time off to deal with parents. In fact I also believe that employee assistance programs (EAP) would benefit from offering solutions or recommendations for solutions to help these employees.

Maybe my thinking here is a bit ahead of what the Big Fish are willing to take on. Another observation by @VentureValkyriedrove this conclusion home:

"Innovative medical device, diagnostic and wellness companies present at PBGH Innovation Day to pitch ideas about sinusitis, sleep apnea, fertility, asthma, wellness games, etc. were interesting and all, but seemed to barely rise to the level of attention when compared to the varsity league. The vendors there to discuss new screening and interventional tools or wellness apps to help weed out the unnecessary diabetes and cardiology treatments got some attention, but anything that was discussed under the category of “managing absenteeism” or around other medical conditions got far less mind share."

Big employers and big payers are driven by numbers. A good list of criteria to think about when trying to address the needs of these big players:

"A low implementation burden (time and cost) relative to plausible advantage gain;
Independent impact evaluations, funded by the innovator, to justify adoption and continued use;
Results-based pricing, including zero pricing when an innovation is ineffective; and,
An overall result of fewer treatments per person, fewer services or product inputs per person and/or less cost per person."

For many startups especially those in the health and wellness market, these are pretty tough criteria. As an adult child of parents that aren’t located in the same city or even the same part of the country, I’ve been diving into the aging in place market. I am keenly interested in technology solutions that I believe can make an impact by enabling adult children and caregivers to provide the best possible quality of life for their loved ones. I’m struck by the fact that there are a number of solutions in the market that can help, but awareness about these options among employers, geriatric care managers and adult children who are caregivers is really very low. My hope is that big employers can be one of the levers to drive a change in awareness using their size and scale. I don’t think this has to be entirely altruistic. It can be motivated by a healthy dose of self-preservation, but for now I’m not sure that the big Fish are biting.

I’m a glass half full kind of guy. I believe that the numbers will drive the behavior sooner rather than later. The demographic tsunami of aging parents and children caring for those parents isn’t going anywhere and I have faith that employers will play a role in addressing these issues.

I’m an eternal optimist and want to be a part of changing healthcare. I've cross posted this over at my blog Healthcare Change Agitator.

I hope you’ll join me in agitating for change… There are a number of ways to connect:

Subscribe to my blog: https://healthcarechangeagitator.blogspot.com/
You can follow me on twitter @markp_healthit
Send me an invite to network on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markphillipshealthit
Check out my pins and infographics on Pinterest: https://pinterest.com/markphillipshit/engaged-patients-and-healthy-consumers/

Recent Articles