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BLOG — Lost and found: Sjögren’s disease
Once upon a time I was a consultant for a company called Nicox. One of its products was a rather unique immunologic test for Sjögren’s disease called Sjö. In fact, it was the subject of one of my earliest Healio.com/OSN blogs. Really strong data have demonstrated that Sjö is substantially more accurate in making a confirmed diagnosis of Sjögren’s disease, an important part of our job as dry eye specialists. Nicox employed the messaging wizard Jason Menzo at the time, and what looked like an impossible sell — get ophthalmologists to perform a test for free — looked like it was going to happen. Jason created an extraordinary educational campaign making the case for the test.
Right about now you’re scratching your head and remembering Sjö, aren’t you? You’re wondering why you haven’t given even a femtosecond worth of thought about ordering one, too. Why is that?
Glad you asked. Sjö is now the best kept secret in the Valeant stable of products. It’s tucked in there somewhere along with Doctors’ Allergy, another acquisition that occurred in the twilight of Valeant’s Pac-Man phase. We thought there must be a better way to use this useful test so we got our hands dirty moving boxes and piles of stuff in B+L’s attic and brought it back out.
It turns out that B+L’s fledgling diagnostic division has managed to work out contracts with two national laboratory companies to draw the samples and send them on to the single resource lab in Albany, New York. Both LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics will draw your patient’s blood and start the billing process for the test. Therein lies the problem for us in the trenches: Many health insurance policies will not cover these lab companies, and it’s still a big old black box when it comes to knowing if insurance will cover the test itself.
Here’s a little friendly advice for my chums over at B+L: Treat Sjö like one of your medications and give us clear guidance on who pays for it. Seriously, I really do appreciate the work you did getting Quest and LabCorp on board. Help a brother out. There aren’t enough hours in the day to spend time in the office doing insurance pre-certs for a one-off lab test.
I really want to order Sjö, and I promise I’ll do it a lot if I can just write a simple order and wait for the results.
Disclosure: White reports he is a consultant for Bausch + Lomb, Allergan, Shire and Eyemaginations; is on the speakers board for Bausch + Lomb, Allergan and Shire; and has a financial interest in TearScience.