New Thinking on Paying for Diabetes Innovations

In the UK, improving access to new medicines and medical technologies is not always straightforward and in these current harsh economic times, the costs of innovation are the major concern.

For new medicines and devices, a novel approach might be to consider passing some of the risk back to the company by "buying outcomes" rather than the drug or technology per se. For new drugs, this would mean buying outcomes based on research evidence from clinical trials so that if a new drug achieves the pre-determined desired outcomes over a fixed period of time then it would be continued to be funded. However if it did not achieve this there would be a rebate for the healthcare system. This is equivalent to having a warranty on a new car. The advantage of this approach would be (a) clinical trial subject participants would need to reflect the background population,  (b) the outcomes of clinical trials would need to be relevant to the payers and (c) industry would be encouraged to act as more than simple purveyors of medicines by providing support to optimise the benefits of their products.

The same approach could be used for new medical devices so with this in mind we are sending this request to the companies that manufacture real-time continuous glucose sensors for people with diabetes.

Re: Real-time glucose sensors

As you are aware we are very enthusiastic about the role of technology in helping to deliver excellence in diabetes care. This includes continuous glucose monitoring systems. Although the latter systems.

In 2011, many of our patients benefitted from the data provided by CGMS and for 2012-13 we would like to develop this further. Recently barriers to accessing technologies for diabetes care were discussed at a All-Parliamentary Committee at the UK House of Commons.

Therefore rather than adopting the traditional cost model of purchasing up-front systems and equipment that offers blocks of days of sensing at a time, we would like to explore a new approach to funding CGMS for patients with diabetes.

Consequently we are writing to the 3 main sensor companies (Medtronic, Abbott Diabetes Care and Dexcom) to ask them to provide the costs of delivering 500 and 1000 days of real-time continuous glucose monitoring data which includes all hardware, any equipment failures as well as VAT (tax).

We will let you know the response???

15/10/12

Dexcom: No response
Abbott Diabetes Care: No response
Medtronic: Very interested in developing this idea