DIGITAL HEALTH BRIEFING: JPMorgan CEO opens up on partnership with Amazon, Berkshire - UK diagnostics service comes to WeChat - Digital revolution slashes wait times in London

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JPMORGAN CEO UNVEILS MORE INFO ON AMAZON, BERKSHIRE PARTNERSHIP: In an annual letter to investors, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon revealed more information on the hyped partnership between Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase. The three firms plan to pool their resources, including around 1 million employees, their healthcare costs, and data, to diminish costs and improve patient outcomes in the US.

The firms have a multi-pronged plan of attack as they explore a wide range of topics in US healthcare, including prescription medication, end of life care, and developing wellness programs to tackle obesity and smoking. However, three areas Dimon outlined were particularly interesting given the three companies' expertise in data management, insurance, and payments:

• Incentivizing value-based care: The partnership seeks to align reimbursements with patient outcomes - a system known as value-based care. The aim is to incentivize healthcare providers to work towards positive patient outcomes rather than offering unnecessary tests and exams.
• Improving payment and operational workflow: Inefficient workflows, fraud, and waste are a massive drain on the healthcare system. For example, misattributed claims to Medicare Advantage health plans amounted to more than $16 billion in 2016, according to Kaiser Health News. This multi-billion problem could be helped in part by improving workflows and payment facilities.
• Improving patient access to data: Giving patients control over their data can improve overall health outcomes by making it easier to provide physicians with a full picture of the patient's history. This will ensure physicians aren't doubling up on medication prescriptions or offering unnecessary treatments, in turn reducing costs for payers.

While the initial aim is to solve these issues for their own employees, Amazon, Berkshire, and Chase have grander aspirations. Although it's a while off, the goal is to create solutions that potentially benefit "all Americans," and possibly inform public policy in the US, Dimon said in the letter. To accomplish this, each firm will likely lean on the unique health solutions they already deploy. Chase offers payment processing services for both providers and payers, Berkshire offers healthcare liability insurance to providers through MedPro Group, and Amazon offers healthcare specific cloud solutions.

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WECHAT SERVES AS LAUNCHPAD FOR BRITISH AI DIAGNOSTICS APP: Babylon, a British telehealth start-up that uses AI to diagnose illnesses, is partnering with WeChat parent Tencent to make its diagnostic services available to the chat app's 1 billion users, according to The Financial Times. Currently, Babylon has just over 1.4 million users who pay for virtual consultations with doctors, and use the app's free AI-powered symptom checker.

Partnering with Tencent will provide Babylon with a massive, highly engaged, mobile-only audience in China. Primarily based in China, WeChat is accessed by around 93% of citizens in Tier 1 cities like Beijing and Shanghai for things such as online shopping, sending payments, booking doctor's appointments, and organizing ride-hailing services. For these users, it would make perfect sense to turn to their chat app to check their symptoms, rather than going to a desktop.

Babylon's looking to international audiences for growth as it faces mounting scrutiny from healthcare providers in UK. The company signed a trial with the UK's National Health Service (NHS) in November 2017. Since then, however, UK doctors have said the app could be unsafe or increase pressure on the public health system by misdiagnosing symptoms.

Much of this pushback comes because there's no gold standard for what counts as "good healthcare" for telehealth and digital health services. "Companies offering telehealth services need to have processes in place to track and assess the care being delivered," Oscar Health Director of Care Delivery Neil Parikh recently told Business Insider Intelligence. As digital health offerings gain traction, there's an opportunity for those that can back up the quality of their services to pull ahead of the competition. This will be particularly important as governments begin to take notice of mHealth and telehealth solutions and roll out regulations.

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LONDON'S 'DIGITAL REVOLUTION' SLASHES PATIENT WAIT TIMES: London is pioneering a National Health Service (NHS) e-referral program for family doctors that aims to get patients access to expert second opinions within 24 hours of seeing their physician, according to The Evening Standard. Under the new system - slated to replace paper referral forms when they're sunset in October this year - general practitioners (GPs) can obtain advice and guidance from a specialist to help decide on the next stage of treatment. For example, they can send a photograph of a mole they're concerned is cancerous to a dermatologist. NHS program administrators hope the new system will move patients through the healthcare journey faster - around 1 in 20 patients seen by a GP in London are referred to hospital, which adds up to 1.5 million appointments each year. The early specialist access could help facilitate faster appointments and reduce bottlenecks in specialist wait times. Additionally, the digital system will ensure that only patients who need to see a specialist are moved along in the process. Barts Health NHS Trust, a hospital system that runs five hospitals in London, is among the first to apply the e-referral program, ahead of a London-wide rollout. Early trials have resulted in wait times being slashed from 15 weeks to just five days.

NEGATIVE ONLINE DOCTOR REVIEWS AREN'T BASED ON CARE: Online reviews of doctors are more likely to reflect institutional problems than the doctor's skill, according to a newly published study by the Mayo Clinic. The results highlight an important disconnect between "industry-vetted patient satisfaction scores and online review comments," Mayo Clinic senior author Sandhya Pruthi said. What this means is that some patients may be foregoing good care because of problems outside of the doctor's control, such as the state of the reception room, nursing staff, waiting time, and parking. Given that Millennials commonly research doctors' ratings when choosing a physician, according to a recent EBRI Research survey, this could significantly impact a clinic's or hospital's attendance and therefore revenue potential. One way to solve this might be for sites and apps to break review options into categories, such as waiting room, parking, front desk, and physician care. This would both help to specify pain points for the consumer, while also helping to mitigate reviews that aren't reflective of a physician's skill.

IN OTHER NEWS:

• US pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced the second cohort of Pfizer Healthcare Hub. The London-based innovation hub aims to help established digital healthcare startups continue to develop and navigate the UK healthcare system. In championing the healthcare hub, Pfizer can keep tabs on innovation in digital health, particularly startups within the digital therapeutics space, which is beginning to threaten big pharma's top line.