Interesting perspective on patient centric strategy and Point of Care Dx as part of Novartis strategy
Agents of Change: Interview with David Epstein
Paul Simms discusses Novartis’ transformation to a healthcare company with David Epstein, head of Novartis Pharmaceuticals.
[….]
Paul: Okay, […] Is anywhere else attracting a rising amount of your time?
David: In terms of moving towards outcomes and system-building, we are building a real world evidence group. We now have a digital medicines team which is charged with ensuring patients go home, not just with drugs, but the various sensors and iPhone-related questions to improve the outcome for those patients and collect data and feed it back to physicians, caregivers and buyers. Those are big initiatives. We also have an initiative around blood testing that we will launch at the end of this year - a table-top device that will sit in doctors’ offices, so they will be able to do a lot of the tests they send out to laboratories, in order to better select patients for treatment in real time.
Paul: That’s a diagnostic tool?
David: Yes, with the idea that you only want the right patients treated. After all, fundamentally, we have a strange industry. If you go shopping, buy a shirt, and find it’s wrong, what do you do? Take it back and exchange it. If you don’t like a product, you get your money back. In our industry, our drugs work perhaps 30 or 40% of the time: patients have consumed it, buyers have paid for it, but people can have side effects and are getting no benefit. However, that model cannot exist in the future. We are one of the few industries on this route, and we need to move towards more risk sharing. You need to do the digital stuff and the real world evidence stuff in partnership with payers to make that happen. Patients need to contribute by being more compliant.
Paul: Presumably these diagnostic tests are specifically linked to your own products?
David: They will be initially. The first few tests which are all the same platform will be our products and then we will open it up. It is a physical device. You get a special card, there is a series of sensors, lights and other things that will measure blood levels, various proteins, drugs and so on to make it very easy to get an answer. We have a drug called Xolair which is used to treat allergic asthma where you need to know a patient’s IgE levels. Usually you have to send that out to test, taking two weeks - with this, they will get the answer in four minutes.
Paul: Is that device always going to stay in the doctor’s office or is it going to move into the patients’ hands at any point, in your opinion?
David: The second generation device, which is not out for probably another year and a half, will be connected to the cloud for submitting data. The third generation device will plug into an iPhone, but that is a little more science fiction right now. We bought the company and have been working on it for a couple of years to get it where we want it.
Paul: You are forging ahead. Do you feel this is a relatively entrepreneurial venture within the company you have here?
David: I think it is very entrepreneurial. This will help us take the next step forward, so only the right people are getting the drugs they need. We have proved the technology works, we know that now, so we are pretty excited about it.
Paul: What about using the device to bring together internal departments within Novartis? I often discuss the rise of the medical organization relative to the commercial organization. I hear about trying to integrate more into the wider healthcare system as a delivery partner and those are not two things you have mentioned specifically.
David: We are doing that: though we started down that road several years ago. We have made a lot of progress in that regard. Commercial organizations for the most part have been getting smaller and will continue to do so. However, they will not go away but change. Medical is becoming increasingly important so that has been a big part of what we have been doing.