JDRF’s Tom Robinson Explains How to Use the T1D Index
The Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) Index, launched in September, provides payers with a good basis for value-based healthcare, said Tom Robinson, vice president of global access at JDRF.
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How can someone navigate the T1D index?
The easiest way is to just go to T1Dindex.org and look at the map of the world there, maybe compare a few interesting countries, and then dive into the one that matters most to you. It then takes you through the history of this country and what Type 1 looks like today – the growth story, the loss and strain, and what can be done to address that strain. If you want to go deeper, you can dive deep from there lancet Paper, or there is a dashboard tool, or the code base is available open source. So beyond that, there’s a lot of layers to remove, but the starting point is just the T1Dindex.org website.
What information can patients, providers, and payers glean from the T1D Index?
The Index is this incredibly rich simulation of each country, but there are 3 main numbers we pull from it. The first is how many people live with type 1. The second is how many people should be living with type 1 if they were really well cared for. The third is how many years of healthy life the average person who develops Type 1 loses.
And then for each of those numbers, we also look at how interventions can improve care and change the numbers and history of type 1 in this country. And I think how you deal with that is really different depending on who you are. If you’re a person living with Type 1, you might delve into, “Oh wow, each additional test drive could add 4 hours to my life. Maybe I’ll think about marching into that local pharmacy and arrange for test drive stock.” For a vendor, they might look at some of the incidence rates and ask, “Hey, are we catching everyone?” or look at the growth estimates and say, “Are we prepared for this? Do we need to think about evolving our model for this rapid growth in Type 1?”
Frankly, for a payer, government, or insurer, you have some good foundations for value-based healthcare in this model. You can bring in your cost models, the epidemiology that we’ve done, and then leave out things like dollars per year of life or hoover the modeling of complications and look at lifetime healthcare costs and so on. Some of this is readily available on the site, others you’ll have to start with the interactive tools to really get to grips with it and get the full value from it, but there’s a lot of depth behind that kind of initial public face.