The largest biopharma layoffs of 2014

FiercePharma | by Eric Palmer

 The pharma industry has taken like none other to the notion of controlling costs by laying off employees. And so every year there will be some substantial number of displacements. But how substantial will depend on lots of factors in any given year.

The layoff roller-coaster ride also has lots of ups and downs. And so while the top 10 announced layoffs in 2011-2013 averaged nearly 30,000 a year, there were far fewer in 2014. In fact, so few that this year we tallied only 10,691 among 7 companies.

Drugmakers tie layoffs to one financial factor or another, a pending patent cliff loss, perhaps, or a failed program. The approach in the past year has been decidedly different and one that will play out over several years before the net employee numbers are evident.

The Strategy That Will Fix Health Care

Harvard Business Review | Michael Porter & Thomas H. Lee

In health care, the days of business as usual are over. Around the world, every health care system is struggling with rising costs and uneven quality despite the hard work of well-intentioned, well-trained clinicians. Health care leaders and policy makers have tried countless incremental fixes—attacking fraud, reducing errors, enforcing practice guidelines, making patients better “consumers,” implementing electronic medical records—but none have had much impact.

It’s time for a fundamentally new strategy

At its core is maximizing value for patients: that is, achieving the best outcomes at the lowest cost. We must move away from a supply-driven health care system organized around what physicians do and toward a patient-centered system organized around what patients need. We must shift the focus from the volume and profitability of services provided—physician visits, hospitalizations, procedures, and tests—to the patient outcomes achieved. And we must replace today’s fragmented system, in which every local provider offers a full range of services, with a system in which services for particular medical conditions are concentrated in health-delivery organizations and in the right locations to deliver high-value care.