A focused follow-up to the Alzheimer’s Design Lab
Why this matters
A clear takeaway from the Design Lab is that we lack a shared, decision-ready understanding of the true value of Alzheimer’s care. Costs and benefits are fragmented across patients, caregivers, payers, and society—and across time horizons. As a result, even well-intentioned stakeholders make rational decisions within misaligned incentives.
At the same time, the system itself is evolving—from reactive disease care toward more proactive prevention and early intervention. As value shifts earlier and across longer time horizons, the need for shared, longitudinal measures of system performance becomes even more urgent.
We need a common framework to make value visible across stakeholders and over time.
Our focus
NEWDIGS is launching a targeted effort to prototype Biomedical Health Efficiency (BHE) using Alzheimer’s disease as an initial application.
BHE aims to:
- Provide a shared measurement framework across stakeholders
- Integrate Outcomes, Resource Use, and Impact
- Enable longitudinal visibility into system performance
- Support more coordinated, evidence-informed decisions
Measures such as the % of treatment-eligible patients receiving appropriate therapy will be used as signals of system performance—not product uptake—reflecting whether patients are being identified, diagnosed, and treated in a timely and coordinated way.
How we will work
To respect time constraints and maximize input, this will be a targeted, research-driven effort, not a standing working group.
- 1:1 conversations with stakeholders
- Small, focused discussions (2–5 participants) as needed
- Ongoing synthesis and refinement by NEWDIGS
Outputs
- Evolving BHE framework
- Application to Alzheimer’s Roadmap 2030
- Peer-reviewed publication (target: December 2026)
Invitation
We welcome input from across our community.
If you’re interested in contributing—through a brief discussion or feedback—please let us know.
About the Center for Biomedical System Design
The NEWDIGS Consortium is dedicated to improving health by accelerating appropriate, timely, and equitable patient access to biomedical products in ways that work for all stakeholders.
Based at the Center for Biomedical System Design at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, NEWDIGS aims to help the health care system catch up with the science of biomedical innovation by removing barriers and designing methods to ensure that cutting-edge treatment is made available to patients. The consortium’s collaborators include patients, clinicians, payers, biopharmaceutical companies, regulators, and investors, among others.
Launched at MIT in 2009, the organization moved to Tufts Medical Center in 2022 to be closer to patient care and to longstanding collaborators. Among its successes are payment innovations for durable cell and gene therapies, and regulatory innovations that inspired a European-wide pilot led by the European Medicines Agency focused on Adaptive (Licensing) Pathways.
Its current work integrates insights from all prior projects to advance “Biomedical Health Efficiency” - a new system innovation methodology focused on optimizing outcomes with fewer resources for all patients through improved alignment of stakeholder goals, strategies, incentives, and metrics.