Conference Presentation, Panel
The Promise of Public Health
Milken InstituteMike Klowden, Richard Besser, Nancy Brown, Thomas Farley, Joseph Jimenez, Fred Upton
- The Milken Institute anticipates the summit will establish a long-term tradition characterized by high attendance, difficult scheduling choices for participants, and the online posting of all panels by the following day.
- Joe Jimenez projects that the global population will increase by one billion over the next decade, with half of that growth consisting of individuals over age 55, driving increased chronic disease burdens.
- Nancy Brown outlines a commitment by the American Heart Association to reduce deaths from heart disease and stroke by 20% by 2020, while Fred Upton warns that sequestration and budget constraints threaten research funding.
- Strategic efforts focus on shifting the balance of medical research to make prevention as significant as cure discovery, with Tom Farley noting that chronic diseases have become the primary killers despite reduced infectious disease epidemics.
- Demographic and lifestyle interventions are expected to yield significant results, exemplified by New York City's smoking rate dropping to 14%, which is predicted to save tens of thousands of lives.
- Policy initiatives aim to improve health outcomes through government frameworks, specifically through bipartisan menu labeling legislation passed by the House, with hopes for Senate action to support FDA implementation.
- Technological advancements, including real-world data from devices like Fitbits and Bluetooth-enabled scales, are expected to shift healthcare from transactional models to outcomes-based systems and facilitate precision medicine.
- Pharmaceutical market dynamics are anticipated to change with GleeVEC becoming generic by the first of the year, leading to multiple generic entrants within six months and reducing costs to pennies a day for leukemia patients.
- Concerns exist regarding the sustainability of drug innovation without incentives, as venture capital investment in this sector dropped by 50% over the last four to five years, prompting calls for renewed government support.
- The 21st Century Cures bill is predicted to shorten drug approval timelines and costs, enabling the repurposing of new drugs and treatment for rare diseases, with hopes to incorporate the President's Cancer Moonshot Initiative.
- Future public health efforts are projected to prioritize communities with the highest needs to ensure equal access to health over the next 20 to 100 years, with optimism regarding improvements in U.S. infant mortality and life expectancy.
- Incentive structures are expected to drive investment in new antibiotics and address global infectious disease challenges like tuberculosis, though early disease detection alone is cautioned as insufficient without conditions that enable behavioral change.
- Integration of disparate health data sources into single dashboards is envisioned to allow for deep phenotyping and elegant time-sequence data analysis, supporting a more unified approach to patient care and public health strategy.