NEWDIGS Consortium

Cross-stakeholder collaboration for system-wide innovation

NEWDIGS 15th anniversary logo, 2009-2024Our work in payment innovation began in 2016 in our FoCUS project, centered on durable, and potentially curative, cell and gene therapies (CGT). Financial innovation is critical for this important emerging product class in order to ensure both appropriate, timely access for patients and sustainability for the biomedical and healthcare systems. Key financial challenges exacerbated by CGT includes:

  • Payment Timing (high one-time payments)
  • Performance Uncertainty of Products (real-world effectiveness and durability)
  • Actuarial Risk (number of eligible patients)

As we crystallized and shared our guiding principles for payment innovation, it became clear that our innovation approach and emerging solutions would have applicability beyond CGT, for chronic treatments and prevalent diseases.

In addition, the common challenge across all product types and therapeutic areas – the need for the progressive reduction of uncertainty about the real-world product performance – highlighted the importance of the work underway in LEAPS for enabling payment innovation.

In order to accelerate and amplify our impact from payment innovation, we addressed both of these opportunities by integrating FoCUS and LEAPS, and broadening our focus beyond CGT to a broader range of product and disease types under the umbrella of Payment Innovation.

Using a case-based approach to explore different archetypes of product classes and therapeutics areas, we elucidate important, actionable insights to advance tailored payments innovations. Our innovation process follows four key steps:

  • Design Solutions – focused on a series of actual and synthetic case studies selected by our collaborator community.
  • Enable Implementation – addressing significant barriers to the implementation and scaling of solutions designed including, for example, policy, technology, incentives, processes
  • Disseminate and Catalyze – practical education and tools regarding the “why do” and “how to” for critical end-user audiences to fuel adoption
  • Monitor and Learn – leveraging insights from real-world implementation of payment innovations as they emerge in the marketplace, and accelerating the elucidation of best practices

Examples of outputs from our recent activities in each of these areas can be found in Resources.

Benefits of Consortium Membership

  • Strategic value from the preview of, and/or ability to shape, developments before they reach the market
  • Community and partnerships
  • Integrated systems view in all aspects of solution design
  • Opportunity for collective action to accelerate system readiness for solution implementation

Current members and collaborators

If you are interested in discussing Membership, please contact tuftsmcnewdigs@tuftsmedicine.org