The Birth of an Entirely New Industry: This is how media will become reimbursable Immersive Medicine in 2025.
I cannot tell you how much I loved writing this post. It is long, but will outline how media and medicine will converge to create a massively effective, affordable and accessible Immersive Medicine marketplace.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has proposed reimbursement for digital therapeutics that treat mental health.
This will include paying the makers of DTx and doctors to orientate and monitor patients who use these digital therapies.
The catch? The therapies will need to be cleared by the FDA. And today, only about 20 digital treatments (of the 20,000) have been cleared and just five of them are digital mental health treatments (DMHT).
The intersection of media and medicine has arrived, but to make effective digital therapeutics we will need to work together differently:
– Traditional therapy designers, doctors and engineers will need to recognize that expertise in DTx REQUIRES expertise in digital entertainment for adherence. Only the top experience designers in the world know how to do this (many live in gaming, mixed media, social, film and music)
– Gaming and entertainment professionals will need to learn to play in a vastly different market with vastly different rules. Removal of exploitative monetization mechanics will be required to reach this 3 TRILLION dollar industry. (I do love this irony)
– The regulatory agencies will need to learn that effective media (i.e effective digital therapeutics) cannot be created or maintained in a traditional software as a medical device (SaMD) environment. (DeepWell DTx is working on this one and agencies are actively collaborating.)
This week I will share some look back posts where we first discussed this possibility… but it is here today and it is TIME TO GO!
https://bhbusiness.com/2024/07/12/cms-fee-schedule-calls-for-digital-therapeutics-reimbursement/
