The CONNECT Collaborator Series is an interview series where we host conversations with healthcare professionals and partners with the goal of encouraging deeper collaboration in the healthcare industry.
Watch the full CONNECT Collaborator Series video featuring our Co-Founder, Lorie Spence and Founder and Chief Collaboration Officer of Health Collaboration Partners, David Lee here:
Lorie Spence: Welcome to the Connect Collaborator Interview Series, where we host 10-minute conversations with healthcare professionals and partners with the goal of encouraging deeper collaboration in the healthcare industry. Today’s guest may look familiar. We brought back our colleague, David Lee, the Founder and Chief Collaboration Officer at Health Collaboration Partners and Executive Director of Alliance for Health Implementation Science. David’s organization, Health Collaboration Partners, helps healthcare nonprofits, startups and biotechs by increasing funding support, optimizing multi-sector collaborations and communicating scientific impact more effectively. One of David’s most recent collaborations is with the Alliance for Health Implementation Science, which is looking to transform how patients can benefit from healthcare innovation. David, welcome back and thanks for joining us again.
David Lee: Great to be a repeat guest! I really appreciate it. Great to see you.
Lorie Spence: Excellent! David, I’m interested in learning more about the Alliance for Health Implementation Science. I think it goes by A.H.I.S. Can you tell us a little bit more about what makes it so unique?
David Lee: The Alliance for Health Implementation Science, or A.H.I.S., as you said, is a newly launched nonprofit organization really focuses on the gaps in implementation science. There’s this crazy statistic that it takes, on average, 17 years for a new therapy or care model to be put into routine clinical practice. So the goal of the organization is to drive that innovation, because patients can’t wait 17 years to potentially have access to the right care that they need—innovative therapies. As we look at the landscape, especially here in the United States, we see that there isn’t any one organization focused on implementation science broadly. We have nonprofit groups and industry partners that may be doing certain projects in specific disease areas, but no one is looking at this overall. You can’t do implementation science across all diseases so really, our goal is to start to drill into some specific disease areas and see what triggers we can help push over the edge to accelerate that work. It might be a policy change, education of healthcare professionals and consumers, whatever those gaps are, and the reasons why there is this large time gap in access to some of these medicines and care models. We want to make sure that we can accelerate those because the average patent life of new therapy is about 17 years. So if we can shrink that even by five years, getting the right patients on the right therapies, we’re going to really be able to drive patient outcomes much more rapidly,
Lorie Spence: I think you’ve kind of alluded to this already, but this increased shift in implementation science, why do you think it’s so critical to patient outcomes and evidence-based practice? Especially since education and education models have been around for a long time.
David Lee: I’ve been in the Osteoporosis space for about 12 years, and I had never really realized that many of the gaps in osteoporosis patient outcomes are due to implementation science gaps. There are multiple ones, I would say, from the educational side, the provider side, healthcare professionals, and the consumer side. They don’t prioritize it, or they see it as something that’s just a part of normal aging, and there is nothing you can do about it. I would say even on the policy and payer side, at least in the United States, especially, there’s a model called a Fracture Liaison Service that has spread across the globe to make sure that patients after they have a fracture, get screened, diagnosed, and treated with osteoporosis if they have it. The reimbursement model here in the US is very challenging in that it’s hard to start these programs, just from a purely financial perspective. It involves hiring a coordinator to run these programs, and then expects the program is actually going to lead to less fractures, which if you look at it from a purely financial perspective, is lost revenue to the institution if they’re in it for the fee for service, as opposed to a value-based payment model.
I think there’s a lot that needs to be done at the top of the house, it’s what we call top-down. Changing policies as well as education, are what we call bottom-up. I think we have opportunities in osteoporosis and lots of other diseases where we have these gaps to accelerate the ability to get either care pathways set up or get access to appropriate therapies here in the U.S. again. Sometimes you’ve got to step through a couple of therapies before you get the therapy that your physician would like you on because of payer issues or other issues related to access to therapy. I think we can create some programs through A.H.I.S. that would be a multi-stakeholder effort, both at the project level as well as at the organizational level. So we would have biopharma companies, leading clinicians, nonprofit groups, patient groups, and patients themselves, creating these plans to see how we can work together across sectors to make a bigger impact than many of the individual stakeholders have been making on their own.
Lorie Spence: What do you see as the opportunity for industry or their role to support these implementation science programs?
David Lee: There are some industry partners that have field-based staff that are focused on implementation science or have programs that are driving some of this work—i.e. funding research and funding education. I think more and more industry partners also see this as an opportunity if they can help their customers figure out some of these challenges and provide tools to be able to better address some of these disease states. In the case of osteoporosis, finding these post-fracture patients and then using mechanisms to find patients who maybe don’t know that they have osteoporosis are also important. Certainly, a lot of the AI and machine learning, especially imaging companies, that are coming to the forefront are now in osteoporosis. For instance, we are able to do very intelligent primary prevention because they can find an x-ray or CT scan that was done a couple of years ago, and measure that bone mineral density instead of waiting. In this Fracture Liaison Model, you don’t capture the patient until they’ve had a fracture. So I think a lot of the technological advances are also going to much more rapidly address chronic disease because we will have this ability to find these patients. Right now, that is a little bit harder in the old school system and a lot of medicine still sits within.
Lorie Spence: You recently shared the JAMA article by Rita Rubin on the goal of implementation sciences really speeding up evidence changes in practice. What do you think is one program you’ve seen or you’re aware of that’s really demonstrating this need for implementation science and its effectiveness?
David Lee: Amgen has a program called the LATTICE Consortium, which is focused on cardiovascular disease, and a lot of the work and funding that is being supported through that program is really starting to get our heads around what those gaps or levers are that we need to pull to be able to get more patients first screen for cholesterol. Then, of course, if they need a therapy, looking at what interventions they might need to be able to address that. Cardiovascular disease has a lot of impact beyond even cardiovascular disease and lots of comorbidities. And for many other chronic diseases in a very similar place, lots of work is happening around implementation science. So I think the time is ripe to have a group like A.H.I.S. to be able to pull all this together. Our strategy in the short term is to start to develop a couple of key initiatives. We’re starting to scope out initiatives in asthma, rare diseases, looking at cardiovascular and bone health as well as other places that we could start. And I think once we can really start to implement some of those projects, then we’ll be able to build the larger coalition, for example, a membership program that would have all the stakeholders at the table. That would be the place we’d solve some of those larger implementation science issues that cross-cut various disease states.
Lorie Spence: What do you really look forward to accomplishing in the next 12 to 18 months?
David Lee: Launching and implementing the first couple of initiatives and getting readouts. Also, from a KPI perspective and patient outcomes perspective, looking at how we can start to move the bar on those diseases. And I think then the enthusiasm will start to snowball. Given that we’re still in startup mode, you just have to measure how much we can do with the small staff and small group of folks we have. But I think as we build our programs and can build our infrastructure and our capabilities, that’s going to give us a good opportunity to start to really make an impact around implementation science.
Lorie Spence: Once again, can you tell us where the best place for people to connect with you is?
David Lee: www.ahis.org is the best place to learn more about A.H.I.S and what we’re doing. With my other hat, Health Collaboration Partners, you can go to www.health collaborationpartners.com or you can certainly find me on LinkedIn.
The other thing I wanted to mention back to A.H.I.S. is that we did a launch salon investment event in July here in the Los Angeles area, where I’m based and where a lot of the folks that are working on A.H.I.S. are based. The one thing that was a takeaway for me from this event was there were people who came to this event that maybe didn’t know much about implementation science, or weren’t even necessarily in the healthcare field. The emotional stories that came out as people started to reflect on themselves, their family members, and parents who had bad health outcomes because of implementation science gaps were really validating and rewarding to see. People were starting to see how a group like A.H.I.S. could really make an impact. I wanted to make sure that I got that in before, before we concluded, because it was really, really impactful to me.
Lorie Spence: Well, that’s fantastic. David, thank you for your time today.
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