NPC in Specialty Pharmacy Times: Going Below the Headlines on Health Spending in Four Steps

When it comes to health care spending, we need to look beyond the news headlines that tend to focus on narrow aspects of health care or blame specific sectors for contributing to the growth in spending. But real problem-solving will only happen if all stakeholders dig deep into the issues at hand within a broadly understood framework to truly understand what is driving health spending.

In his latest commentary for Specialty Pharmacy Times, NPC President Dan Leonard offers four suggestions to reconsider how we assess, analyze and apply the evidence and data around health spending to foster a productive conversation. His suggestions include:

1. Zoom out and look more broadly at a complete picture of the patient care continuum and how one piece fits with the next. If we focus only on one area of health care, we might miss the benefits that other sectors bear on improving health, reducing costs or weeding out low-value services we know are deeply embedded in the system;
2. Improve methods of gathering and evaluating evidence that informs the discussion to better sharpen our focus and take a critical eye to the data and statistics that drive headlines;
3. Stop confining our view on costs and outcomes to one moment in time, instead recognizing that the long-term patient benefit and reduced costs that come with better health may come years after a treatment; and
4. Broaden the range of stakeholders in any given discussion, even when – or especially when – there are competing interests.

Read the full commentary on the Specialty Pharmacy Times site.