| | | | |  | | By Daniel Payne, Erin Schumaker, Carmen Paun and Ruth Reader | | Presented by |  | | | | | | | 
Dan Liljenquist | Intermountain Health | How health systems fare in the coming decades will hinge on how they handle a huge rise in demand fueled by a larger population of older Americans. How’s that? Dan Liljenquist, chief strategy officer at Intermountain Health, the Salt Lake City-based system with 33 hospitals and hundreds of clinics, told Daniel that health systems face perhaps the largest demographic shift in U.S. history, with a huge number of patients getting older and developing more complex conditions. That’s made for increasing demand, even as the supply of care hasn’t kept up, and the imbalance is likely to get worse, he said. The current appointment wait times — sometimes six months to see a doctor — might soon be seen as “the golden days of access,” he said, thanks to a squeeze in supply and glut of demand. Even so: Artificial intelligence is seen by many health leaders as a promising solution to address the problem — but it alone won’t make up for the chasm between supply and demand, Liljenquist said, pointing to the need to hire more clinicians and empower them to see more patients. AI will help, he expects. Already, many systems are adding tools to improve accuracy and efficiency in clinical documentation, among other tasks. Liljenquist said the use cases for AI could grow, imagining a future in which AI provides reliable diagnostic and triaging information for patients — sometimes helping them avoid a visit to a doctor altogether. That vision could be a ways off. Liljenquist said a lack of understanding of how AI systems perform over time — and health providers’ continued responsibility for maintaining high-quality care — leaves many health systems cautious about adopting the technology.
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Copenhagen, Denmark | Shawn Zeller/POLITICO | This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. Americans’ social lives haven’t fully recovered since the pandemic, Bloomberg reports. A survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that adults spent far more time alone in 2023 than in 2019. This also means fewer people date, which has long-term consequences on the workforce, housing demand and tax revenue, according to the report. Share any thoughts, news, tips and feedback with Carmen Paun at cpaun@politico.com, Daniel Payne at dpayne@politico.com, Ruth Reader at rreader@politico.com, or Erin Schumaker at eschumaker@politico.com. Send tips securely through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp.
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LIVE EVENT ON WEDNESDAY: THE FUTURE OF PATIENT CARE AND ACCESS
Join us on Wednesday, Sept. 18, starting at 8:30 a.m. ET, as we dive into how health care delivery innovations fueled by AI and tech are empowering providers to focus more time and resources on patients.
Watch our keynote conversation with HHS’ Micky Tripathi, assistant secretary for technology policy and acting chief artificial intelligence officer. Stick around for a panel conversation with Nancy Howell Agee, CEO of Carilion Clinic; Andrea Downing, president and co-founder of The Light Collective; Kolaleh Eskandanian, VP and CIO of Children’s National Hospital; and Hafeezah Muhammad, founder and CEO of Backpack Healthcare.
RSVP to attend and watch here. | | | | | | | 
Draghi painted a bleak picture of European competitiveness. | Antonio Masiello/Getty Images | Europe is falling behind America in medical innovation due to weak investment and burdensome regulation, former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi reported this week in a much-anticipated review of European competitiveness. Across the pond, business interests are crowing and progressive politicians are shrugging, reports our European colleague Rory O’Neill. The industry take: The pharma and device industries have taken Draghi’s report, commissioned by the EU’s executive arm, as a vindication of what they’ve been saying for years. “Insufficient synchronization across policy domains creates legal uncertainty while fragmentation in the internal market and redundant administrative complexities fuel further hesitation in investing in Europe,” Medical devices lobby MedTech Europe said in a statement. The progressive take: Tilly Metz, a Green Party member and vice chair of the European Parliament’s Public Health Subcommittee, pointed to greater inequality in the U.S. and urged colleagues not to go down that road at a panel hosted by Friends of Europe in Brussels. There’s more to life than competitiveness, Metz said: “I’m afraid that by focusing only on ways of making profit and increasing market share by selling expensive medicine, we … lose what is really important.” The backstory: Europe’s drug sector is among the largest in the world, but the U.S. is surging ahead in key market areas — biologics, drugs for rare diseases and advanced therapies based on genes, cells and tissues. The U.S. is also much quicker to approve new drugs, with a median time of 334 days compared with 430 in Europe. Draghi found Europe isn’t spending enough on innovation. The U.S. private sector spends 0.45 percent of gross domestic product on pharma research compared with 0.11 percent in the EU. The EU, he added, should study the impact of regulation on innovation and patient access.
| | | | A message from Johnson&Johnson: What does health look like to you? At J&J, we believe a healthy community is one served by health workers who are supported and thriving. We are working with partners across the country to achieve health equity and eradicate inequities & health disparities. Learn More. | | | | | | | 
Choosing the right one can be challenging. | Shutterstock | The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health wants to take trial-and-error out of prescription medicine. Doctors have more than 10,000 drugs they can prescribe, but the process of figuring out which regimen works for a patient can be arduous. Biology, environment and other drugs patients take can affect whether a drug is effective, meaning patients must experiment until they find the drug, or drug combination and dosage that works for them. It's an often frustrating, and sometimes dangerous, process. But a new ARPA-H program, called Individual Metabolome and Exposome Assessment for Pharmaceutical Optimization program, or IndiPHARM, seeks to improve it. How so? ARPA-H awarded a research team headed up by Columbia University $39.5 million to develop a platform and monitoring system to prevent medication interactions triggered by genes, environment or lifestyle. The team plans to build a commercial platform using electronic health systems and patient blood sample data, which pharmaceutical suppliers, insurers and doctors will be able to use to check for drug side effects and predict when a patient may react poorly to a drug. Why it matters: Patients harmed by medications result in nearly 700,000 emergency visits and 100,000 hospitalizations in the U.S. annually, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. "Medications have the potential to reduce suffering, alleviate symptoms, prevent serious events, and help people live longer and healthier lives," Gary Miller, the project's principal investigator and professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, said in a statement. "Unfortunately, there is a gap between what drugs are predicted to do and what they actually do in the real world," Miller added. | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
