The organizers of the Healthcare X Prize have called for a blog rally to raise awareness about the award: a $10 million contest that “empowers and engages individuals and communities in a way that dramatically improves health value.”
X Prizes always have high-impact and radical goals. This health-care prize is no different. It’s meant to “improve health value by more than 50 percent in a 10,000 person community during a three year trial.”
So why a prize?
This belief is founded in the idea that aligned incentives can be a powerful way to spur innovation and seek breakthrough ideas from the most unlikely sources. Many of the reform ideas being put forward may not include some of the best thinking, the collective experience, and the most meaningful ways to truly implement change. To address this issue, the X PRIZE Foundation, along with WellPoint Inc and WellPoint Foundation as sponsor, has introduced a $10MM prize for health care innovators to implement a new model of health.
You can read the full post here. But the foundation has released an initial prize design, which I embedded below. Organizers are seeking feedback about the concept, its framework, and “the likelihood of this prize to impact health and health care reform.”
We hope this blog rally amplifies our efforts to solicit feedback from every source possible as we understand that innovation does not always have a corporate address. We hope your engagement starts a viral movement of interest driven by individual people who realize their voice can and must be included. Let’s ensure that all of us – and the people we love – can have a health system that aligns health finance, care delivery, and individual incentives in a way that optimizes individual vitality and community health. Together, we can ensure the best ideas are able to come forward in a transparent competition designed to accelerate health innovation. We look forward to your participation.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
