Amgen’s Integrated Solutions to Help Improve CVD Care

Jen Norton, vice president and head of US Value & Access, Amgen, reviews what Amgen has learned about closing gaps in cardiovascular care, improving outcomes, and reducing costs by partnering with payers and health systems.

This interview is part of the series, "Innovation in Cardiovascular Disease Care & Coverage."

Read the full transcript:

My name is Jen Norton. I'm the vice president and head of US Value & Access at Amgen.

How is Amgen supporting the health care ecosystem to close gaps in cardiovascular (CV) care? What challenges are you looking to address specifically?

At Amgen, we believe it takes coordinated efforts in patient education, health care access, and public health, along with continued biomedical innovation, to address unmet needs in treating cardiovascular disease (CVD).

Together with other stakeholders throughout the health care system, we are cocreating solutions that transform our health care system by not only treating disease after it strikes, but also helping to predict and prevent disease before it occurs. To close gaps in CVD care, our goals are to halve the rate of second heart attack and increase annual lipid testing for all patients with CVD risk factors.

This requires a collective effort to develop pathways that can better standardize the care for patients, improve those outcomes, and deliver cost efficiencies.

Can you please share the lessons learned from Amgen’s partnerships that are/were focused on improving health system solutions?

It is vital to strengthen the continuity of care throughout the CVD patient journey. We are working to put processes in place for patients to receive the right type of care based on their risk factors.

Effectively managing CVD while also containing long-term health care costs is going to require coordinated efforts across the health care ecosystem to close current gaps in disease management. It's also important to partner with stakeholders across the health care system to support educational efforts that address gaps in care while also promoting access.

As an example, Amgen is currently partnering with a large national payer to understand the impact of social risks on cardiovascular events. The goal is to identify the health-related social needs that are predominant contributors to a patient's cardiovascular disease, and ultimately identify an intervention to help that patient.

Our partnership is leveraging a unique dataset focused on social determinants of health (SDoH). It links claims, SDoH survey results, and consumer data to identify social risks impacting the patient journey. Often, controlling for risk factors in high-risk populations and communities requires connecting the health aspects of patient care to social care, to deliver approaches that address the issue holistically.

Because of this, we've also partnered with the CDC Foundation's Alliance for the Million Hearts Campaign that is working toward preventing 1 million heart attacks and strokes through multiple educational campaigns.

What advice would you offer stakeholders seeking to follow suit and capitalize on partnerships to create solutions in population health?

Amgen strongly advocates for moving from the current, reactive, break-and-fix model, if you will, to a proactive and innovative public health approach, aimed predicting and preventing life-altering events from occurring again.

Stakeholders must work alongside one another to move the needle in addressing public and population health challenges. I believe we've established that the right data are available to support this initiative, but in doing so, we're really going to have to work across the continuum and think through how we can address all parts of the patient journey.