Dear clients and friends: Given your interest in health and medicine, we would like to share with you our collection of the most interesting perspectives on our industry's trends and developments. We are happy to share them with you — and hope you share your thoughts with us.

1. Health Crisis or Healthy Marketplace?

A psychiatrist walks into a blog. She talks like an economist. She examines the current state of mental health and concludes: there’s no “mental health crisis,” but a rational market behaving congruent with economic principles. She writes on her Substack, Affective Medicine:  

Whether or not there is greater need in the medical sense, people are definitely “consuming” more mental health care - psychiatric medications, counseling, and diagnoses - in an economic sense. There are many causes of rising consumption, from greater supply to price regulation to marketing-driven demand to low-cost substitutes. Each of these has occurred in recent years. In short, people now use more mental health care because it got cheaper, more desirable, and easier to obtain. 

2. Measuring Patient Input

Here's something everybody in pharma can agree on: the patient voice belongs in drug development. Here’s something nobody in pharma can agree on: how to measure the patient voice in drug development. A new article, co-authored by industry and academia, offers a new way to measure patient engagement.

3.  RIP Retail Clinics

Harvard Business Review paints a dim picture of retail clinics. Once seen as the future, they’re becoming a thing of the past. The business model doesn’t work: 

 Retailers don’t consider primary care a core business line. That’s a problem for retail clinics. Walmart and Kroger don’t want to be viewed as health care companies. Walgreens and CVS Health like to believe they are but in essence remain pharmacy chains. 

This means that current retail clinics, at best, function as loss leaders whose potential value lay in enhancing other parts of the retailer’s business and building overall brand loyalty…But when retail clinics function primarily as loss leaders, downsizing them becomes a rational business choice since right now they are less profitable, purely transactional, unpredictable in terms of their operating costs, and unable to be scaled up cheaply and easily.

4. A Few Good Scientists

Is the next generation of scientists prepared to lead industry and academia? Depends who you ask. A new series in Nature finds that industry is happier with candidates, perhaps due to “young scientists’ growing frustration with academic careers”: 

Hirers in industry are more likely to say that the quality of applicants has improved compared with previous years, whereas academic hirers say it has worsened. The difference is striking: 44% of industry hirers say candidates are better than a few years ago, compared with only 20% of academic hirers. Meanwhile, 43% of academics say that candidate quality has gone down, compared with just 20% of industry hirers. 

5. For Sale: You 

23andMe’s spectacular collapse has been well covered. But what about its most valuable asset: its massive genetic database? The Atlantic wonders, with great concern, about what’s next. It raises questions that all life science companies collecting data may soon need to answer: 

23andMe is floundering in part because it hasn’t managed to prove the value of collecting all that sensitive, personal information. And potential buyers may have very different ideas about how to use the company’s DNA data to raise the company’s bottom line…unlike a doctor’s office, 23andMe is not bound by the health-privacy law HIPAA. And the company’s privacy policies make clear that in the event of a merger or an acquisition, customer information is a salable asset. 23andMe promises to ask its customers’ permission before using their data for research or targeted advertising, but that doesn’t mean the next boss will do the same.