Philanthropists Gary and Mary West launched the West Health Policy Center in Washington, D.C. with the goal of saving up to $100 billion in cumulative health care costs within ten years.
"Health care costs are rising at an unsustainable rate and that has caused a national crisis that threatens our economy and national security, weakens our global competitiveness, causes millions of jobs to be "offshored" and violates public trust," said Gary West. "It is vital for the future of our country to begin immediately focusing on some common sense changes in health care reimbursement and regulation."
Independently funded by a multi-year, multi-million dollar commitment from the Wests, the Policy Center is a non-profit, non-partisan organization with the single aim of lowering health care costs. According to the group, among other things, the Policy Center will initially work to create an efficient medical marketplace by advancing:
-Infrastructure independent care Providing patients with the right care, at the right time, wherever they are, whenever they need it. This will be enabled by new models of care coordination powered by smart technology. This stands in sharp contrast to the current health care delivery system, which is centered around clinician location and appointment availability when a patient has a health crisis.
-Price transparency -- Providing timely, accessible, understandable and actionable price data allows consumers and providers to fully understand the costs associated with diagnostic, therapeutic and routine health care choices.
-Rational reimbursement -- Advocating for reimbursement models that incentivize development and use of equally or more effective low-cost, high-value alternatives to the status quo.
-Practical regulation -- Providing research and analysis for clear regulatory pathways to expeditiously bring tools that enable infrastructure-independent low cost care to consumers and clinicians.
-Appropriate care utilization Identifying wasteful, costly, unnecessary or duplicated health care spending.
According to a release, opportunities for change will be identified through a cornerstone of the Policy Center -- a competitive fellowship program where five established researchers will be selected through a nationwide application and interview process each year based on their ability to identify at least $1 billion in actionable annual health care cost savings. The Policy Center's first fellow is Dr. Peter Neumann, an internationally renowned researcher on the use of cost-effectiveness analysis in health care decision making. He currently serves as the Director of the Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health at the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy at Tufts Medical Center in Boston.
Neumann will join four other fellows in identifying opportunities for regulatory and reimbursement changes, ensuring that the rules across federal agencies such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are aligned with each other to allow for equal or better clinical outcomes at lower costs.
"While the need for system-wide change in health care is dire, our current political climate won't let that happen through legislation. We are confident that the Policy Center will identify practical, common sense solutions that will significantly reduce the cost of health care for all Americans," said West.
"Failure to deal with this rapidly accelerating problem immediately will be catastrophic to the American people and the American way of life. We believe we can identify relatively simple changes that can generate more than $100 billion in cumulative savings over the next ten years. That is why Mary and I created the West Health Policy Center, to do what others have ignored and to provide practical solutions that lower the cost of health care now," he continued.
The Policy Center is part of the West Health Initiative that also includes the West Wireless Health Institute (WWHI) and the West Health Investment Fund, all established by Gary and Mary West. These separate vehicles share a similar mission to lower health care costs by leveraging medical research, education, and investment to spur a low-cost health care ecosystem.
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