Latest / CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered. / How Optimizing Medicines Can Lower Costs w/ DecisionRx President and CFO, Travis Morgan | HealthBiz Briefs

Transcript

How Optimizing Medicines Can Lower Costs w/ DecisionRx President and CFO, Travis Morgan | HealthBiz Briefs · CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered.

• 0:00
  Are we wasting our time by focusing on high drug prices when the real issue is non -optimized prescribing?
• 0:06
  Today's guest makes a compelling argument that taking into account genetics and other factors can lead to dramatic cost savings and better safety.
• 0:21
  Welcome to Health Biz Briefs.
• 0:22
  I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group here with Travis Morgan, president and chief financial officer of DecisionRx, which optimizes medication therapies.
• 0:31
  Welcome, Travis.
• 0:33
  Hey, David.
• 0:34
  Why do medications fail?
• 0:37
  Well, not surprisingly, it's complicated.
• 0:41
  There are myriad reasons any given drug might work fine for you and not for me.
• 0:47
  Part of our platform is that we look comprehensively at as many of those risk vectors as we can.
• 0:54
  We look at nine different distinct reasons that a medication might fail.
• 0:59
  One of the biggest and least engaged is pharmacogenetics, just the differences in how people metabolize drugs.
• 1:07
  So we look at PGX risk, but importantly, we put that in the broader context of drug-drug interaction risk and...
• 1:16
  therapeutic duplication among drugs, contraindications with disease or with age or with lifestyle or gender.
• 1:26
  So we look comprehensively at all those different risk vectors to make recommendations on smarter prescribing decisions.
• 1:34
  You know, I hear PGX, it sounds like oxymoronic movie rating scale, but I know it's pharmacogenomics.
• 1:41
  So that's a good one.
• 1:45
  You know, there's so much focus on drug costs.
• 1:48
  So there's huge emphasis all the way to the presidential level, all the way down to, you know, Joe Sixpack.
• 1:54
  Why do you focus your value proposition on the total cost of care instead of, you know, medications, which is a kind of more obvious focus?
• 2:04
  So it turns out the data show that the cost of medication failure is actually 30 times as large as what we spend on medications that work.
• 2:14
  And so.
• 2:16
  At the end of the day, the most expensive drugs are the ones that don't work, regardless of what the price per pill is.
• 2:24
  And it's super easy to measure what you're spending on drugs, and that's why it gets managed.
• 2:32
  But the medication failure is a 30 times larger problem than the drug spend itself.
• 2:39
  What the data show is that when you apply a comprehensive If medication optimization strategy that includes genetics to optimizing medication therapy, you can reduce 10 to 15 % of the total cost of care for patients just by eliminating the drugs that don't work and replacing them with ones that do.
• 3:02
  There's probably no other clinical intervention I'm aware of that comes even close to the breadth and depth of impact that simply getting people on the right drugs can have.
• 3:14
  So what is medication therapy optimization in practice and is it actually achievable?
• 3:21
  So we define MTO really as four things.
• 3:25
  It's firstly a comprehensive medication review delivered by a clinical pharmacist informed by genetics, pharmacogenetics.
• 3:37
  And fourth, it's delivered in a value-based care model such that the...
• 3:43
  the economic incentives are aligned and doing the best thing clinically for the patient is also the most cost -effective thing for the payers and the providers.
• 3:53
  And so that's MTO is those four things.
• 3:57
  Sounds good.
• 3:57
  You know, in consulting, I'm used to three things.
• 3:59
  So the four is, I think, a bonus, but it's good to hear that.
• 4:03
  I'm looking forward to having MTO come to my friendly neighborhood physician office, which hasn't happened yet.
• 4:09
  So I'll stay tuned for that.
• 4:10
  It'll be there soon.
• 4:12
  Well, that's it for the latest HealthBiz Brief.
• 4:14
  If you like what you hear, check out my HealthBiz podcast for a full length interview with Travis about his life and career.
• 4:21
  Travis Morgan, president and CFO of DecisionRx.
• 4:24
  Thanks so much for joining me today on HealthBiz Briefs.
• 4:27
  Thanks, David.
• 4:27
  Take care.