How does NEWDIGS work?
We can’t get where we need to go one silo at a time. We focus on patient-centered challenges that no single stakeholder can address alone.

NEWDIGS engages a diverse community of stakeholders—patient advocates, clinicians, provider systems, healthcare payers, drug therapy developers, diagnostics companies, academic researchers, investors, and others—in its participatory design processes to balance all interests, overcome barriers and align incentives. NEWDIGS acts as a neutral intermediary between these players to integrate, shepherd, and catalyze change on a systems level, producing solutions that can be generalized beyond a single product, disease, or case.

NEWDIGS provides a safe haven design laboratory for stakeholders who make clinical, business, research and policy decisions to work together – across silos – on new approaches to reducing uncertainty, managing risks, and most importantly: getting the best treatments to patients in timely ways.

Why is NEWDIGS important?
Helping the system catch up with the science.

Science is advancing rapidly in exciting ways, leading to the emergence of long awaited treatments that address unmet medical needs. But to fully capture the value of these new therapies, we need to make sure that the right patients can access them. Overcoming barriers to access that currently exist requires a new approach (multi-stakeholder collaboration) and focus (downstream, or “post-market”, system innovation), reflected in two current projects of NEWDIGS:

LEAPS (Learning Ecosystems Accelerator for Patient-centered, Sustainable Innovation) Project
LEAPS seeks to modernize how we plan, produce, and use real world evidence (RWE) in order to optimize drug therapy regimens for patients. LEAPS seeks to improve patient outcomes in economically sustainable ways through new patient-centered learning healthcare system designs, RWE platform infrastructures, and alignment of incentives across stakeholders. Design collaborators in LEAPS include patient advocacy groups, clinicians, provider systems, healthcare payers, biopharmaceutical and diagnostics companies, regulators, and academic researchers in data science, informatics, biostatistics, epidemiology, and healthcare policy, financing, and reimbursement.

FoCUS (Financing and Reimbursement of Cures in the US) Project
Medical research is making significant advances toward treatments that cure major diseases, but these treatments will often entail very high up-front costs. The FoCUS Project seeks to collaboratively address the need for new, innovative financing and reimbursement models for durable therapies in the US that ensure (1) patient access for needed treatments; (2) affordability for public and private payers; and (3) the sustainability of innovation by manufacturers. This multi-stakeholder effort unites developers, providers, regulators, patient advocacy groups, payers from all segments of the US healthcare system, and academics working in healthcare policy, financing, and reimbursement.

How can my organization get involved?
NEWDIGS consortium members benefit from their participation by helping to shape and gain early strategic insights into next generation solutions; collaboration with other stakeholders and experts; and an environment/tools for driving real-world impact toward shared goals of improving patient outcomes in economically sustainable ways.

Participation in NEWDIGS can take many forms, from receiving periodic newsletters to fully participating in closed-door working team meetings to co-authoring of publications. Consortium Members receive direct access to the Executive Team, as well as guaranteed seats on working teams, advisory roles, and Design Lab participation. Our Design Lab attendees include a carefully curated community of collaborators and experts who share the goals and ideals of NEWDIGS. Opportunities also exist for collaboration on sponsored research projects and joint grant proposals.

To learn more and get started, write to tuftsmcnewdigs@tuftsmedicine.org.