Angle Health Co-founder and CEO Ty Wang thinks recent CMS and FDA initiatives will set a precedent that goes beyond Medicare.
The “Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions Model” from CMS and “Technology-Enabled Meaningful Patient Outcomes for Digital Health Devices Pilot” from the FDA are voluntary programs that work together to expand technology-supported care through outcomes-oriented approaches.
ACCESS focuses on innovations for early cardio-kidney-metabolic conditions, cardio-kidney-metabolic conditions, musculoskeletal conditions and behavioral health. CMS said original Medicare historically lacked payment models to support technology for these conditions.
“Combined with TEMPO, [ACCESS] really unlocks the ability for a lot of these medical devices … to accelerate their development timelines, where they’re able to create evidence in real-world situations,” Mr. Wang said in an interview with Becker’s.
With these programs, Mr. Wang is expecting a faster turnaround for verifying efficacy.
“For the greater payer landscape, it’s going to really reduce the time between actually adopting a lot of these programs, being able to show the clinical proof, and for these companies to be able to show [return on investment] and receive payment.”
But Mr. Wang was not just talking about Medicare payers. Angle Health recently raised $134 million in series B funding to expand its benefits platform, and Mr. Wang is focused on reshaping the healthcare infrastructure to better accommodate small-to-medium-sized employers.
“What Medicare cares about eventually moves into what commercial plans will eventually care about, too,” he said.
Mr. Wang said commercial payers struggle with “a very noisy vendor space,” teeming with initiatives for chronic disease management. These kinds of programs can help payers with “picking the winners and losers and who’s going to survive” in today’s competitive vendor landscape.
“What commercial payers want is to have less noise, to really understand what’s working, what’s not, to have that clearer signal,” Mr. Wang said.
