Clever Firm Predicts Patients Most at Risk, Then Tries to Intervene Before They Get Sicker
Health firm Populytics tracks and analyzes patient data, and makes care suggestions based on that data.
The diabetic patient hit the danger zone.
Ideally, blood sugar, measured by an A1C test, rests at 5.9 or less. A 7 is elevated, according to the Diabetes Council. Over 10, and you're into the extreme danger zone, at risk of every diabetic crisis from kidney failure to blindness.
In three months of working with a case manager, Jen's blood sugar had dropped to 7.2, a much safer range.
This patient's A1C was 10. Let's call her Jen for the sake of this story. (Although the facts of her case are real, the patient's actual name wasn't released due to privacy laws.).
Jen happens to live in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, home of the nonprofit Lehigh Valley Health Network, which has eight hospital campuses and various clinics and other services. This network has invested more than $1 billion in IT infrastructure and founded Populytics, a spin-off firm that tracks and analyzes patient data, and makes care suggestions based on that data.
When Jen left the doctor's office, the Populytics data machine started churning, analyzing her data compared to a wealth of information about future likely hospital visits if she did not comply with recommendations, as well as the potential positive impacts of outreach and early intervention.
About a month after Jen received the dangerous blood test results, a community outreach specialist with psychological training called her. She was on a list generated by Populytics of follow-up patients to contact.
"It's a very gentle conversation," says Cathryn Kelly, who manages a care coordination team at Populytics. "The case manager provides them understanding and support and coaching." The goal, in this case, was small behavioral changes that would actually stick, like dietary ones.
In three months of working with a case manager, Jen's blood sugar had dropped to 7.2, a much safer range. The odds of her cycling back to the hospital ER or veering into kidney failure, or worse, had dropped significantly.
While the health network is extremely localized to one area of one state, using data to inform precise medical decision-making appears to be the wave of the future, says Ann Mongovern, the associate director of Health Care Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in California.
"Many hospitals and hospital systems don't yet try to do this at all, which is striking given where we're at in terms of our general technical ability in this society," Mongovern says.
How It Happened
While many hospitals make money by filling beds, the Lehigh Valley Health Network, as a nonprofit, accepts many patients on Medicaid and other government insurances that don't cover some of the costs of a hospitalization. The area's population is both poorer and older than national averages, according to the U.S. Census data, meaning more people with higher medical needs that may not have the support to care for themselves. They end up in the ER, or worse, again and again.
In the early 2000s, LVHN CEO Dr. Brian Nester started wondering if his health network could develop a way to predict who is most likely to land themselves a pricey ICU stay -- and offer support before those people end up needing serious care.
Embracing data use in such specific ways also brings up issues of data security and patient safety.
"There was an early understanding, even if you go back to the (federal) balanced budget act of 1997, that we were just kicking the can down the road to having a functional financial model to deliver healthcare to everyone with a reasonable price," Nester says. "We've got a lot of people living longer without more of an investment in the healthcare trust."
Popultyics, founded in 2013, was the result of years of planning and agonizing over those population numbers and cost concerns.
"We looked at our own health plan," Nester says. Out of all the employees and dependants on the LVHN's own insurance network, "roughly 1.5 percent of our 25,000 people — under 400 people — drove $30 million of our $130 million on insurance costs -- about 25 percent."
"You don't have to boil the ocean to take cost out of the system," he says. "You just have to focus on that 1.5%."
Take Jen, the diabetic patient. High blood sugar can lead to kidney failure, which can mean weekly expensive dialysis for 20 years. Investing in the data and staff to reach patients, he says, is "pennies compared to $100 bills."
For most doctors, "there's no awareness for providers to know who they should be seeing vs. who they are seeing. There's no incentive, because the incentive is to see as many patients as you can," he says.
To change that, first the LVHN invested in the popular medical management system, Epic. Then, they negotiated with the top 18 insurance companies that cover patients in the region to allow access to their patient care data, which means they have reams of patient history to feed the analytics machine in order to make predictions about outcomes. Nester admits not every hospital could do that -- with 52 percent of the market share, LVHN had a very strong negotiating position.
Third party services take that data and churn out analytics that feeds models and care management plans. All identifying information is stripped from the data.
"We can do predictive modeling in patients," says Populytics President and CEO Gregory Kile. "We can identify care gaps. Those care gaps are noted as alerts when the patient presents at the office."
Kile uses himself as a hypothetical patient.
"I pull up Gregory Kile, and boom, I see a flag or an alert. I see he hasn't been in for his last blood test. There is a care gap there we need to complete."
"There's just so much more you can do with that information," he says, envisioning a future where follow-up for, say, knee replacement surgery and outcomes could be tracked, and either validated or changed.
Ethical Issues at the Forefront
Of course, embracing data use in such specific ways also brings up issues of security and patient safety. For example, says medical ethicist Mongovern, there are many touchpoints where breaches could occur. The public has a growing awareness of how data used to personalize their experiences, such as social media analytics, can also be monetized and sold in ways that benefit a company, but not the user. That's not to say data supporting medical decisions is a bad thing, she says, just one with potential for public distrust if not handled thoughtfully.
"You're going to need to do this to stay competitive," she says. "But there's obviously big challenges, not the least of which is patient trust."
So far, a majority of the patients targeted – 62 percent -- appear to embrace the effort.
Among the ways the LVHN uses the data is monthly reports they call registries, which include patients who have just come in contact with the health network, either through the hospital or a doctor that works with them. The community outreach team members at Populytics take the names from the list, pull their records, and start calling. So far, a majority of the patients targeted – 62 percent -- appear to embrace the effort.
Says Nester: "Most of these are vulnerable people who are thrilled to have someone care about them. So they engage, and when a person engages in their care, they take their insulin shots. It's not rocket science. The rocket science is in identifying who the people are — the delivery of care is easy."
Social distancing is a critical part of the strategy to defeat the novel coronavirus.
Kira Peikoff was the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org from 2017 to 2021. As a journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Nautilus, Popular Mechanics, The New York Academy of Sciences, and other outlets. She is also the author of four suspense novels that explore controversial issues arising from scientific innovation: Living Proof, No Time to Die, Die Again Tomorrow, and Mother Knows Best. Peikoff holds a B.A. in Journalism from New York University and an M.S. in Bioethics from Columbia University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young sons. Follow her on Twitter @KiraPeikoff.
Individuals seeking funding for experimental therapies may enroll in legitimate clinical trials -- or fall prey to snake oil.
Nearly a decade ago, Jamie Anderson hit his highest weight ever: 618 pounds. Depression drove him to eat and eat. He tried all kinds of diets, losing and regaining weight again and again. Then, four years ago, a friend nudged him to join a gym, and with a trainer's guidance, he embarked on a life-altering path.
Ethicists become particularly alarmed when medical crowdfunding appeals are for scientifically unfounded and potentially harmful interventions.
"The big catalyst for all of this is, I was diagnosed as a diabetic," says Anderson, a 46-year-old sales associate in the auto care department at Walmart. Within three years, he was down to 276 pounds but left with excess skin, which sagged from his belly to his mid-thighs.
Plastic surgery would cost $4,000 more than the sum his health insurance approved. That's when Anderson, who lives in Cabot, Arkansas, a suburb outside of Little Rock, turned to online crowdfunding to raise money. In a few months last year, current and former co-workers and friends of friends came up with that amount, covering the remaining expenses for the tummy tuck and overnight hospital stay.
The crowdfunding site that he used, CoFund Health, aimed to give his donors some peace of mind about where their money was going. Unlike GoFundMe and other platforms that don't restrict how donations are spent, Anderson's funds were loaded on a debit card that only worked at health care providers, so the donors "were assured that it was for medical bills only," he says.
CoFund Health was started in January 2019 in response to concerns about the legitimacy of many medical crowdfunding campaigns. As crowdfunding for health-related expenses has gained more traction on social media sites, with countless campaigns seeking to subsidize the high costs of care, it has given rise to some questionable transactions and legitimate ethical concerns.
Common examples of alleged fraud have involved misusing the donations for nonmedical purposes, feigning or embellishing the story of one's own unfortunate plight or that of another person, or impersonating someone else with an illness. Ethicists become particularly alarmed when medical crowdfunding appeals are for scientifically unfounded and potentially harmful interventions.
About 20 percent of American adults reported giving to a crowdfunding campaign for medical bills or treatments, according to a survey by AmeriSpeak Spotlight on Health from NORC, formerly called the National Opinion Research Center, a non-partisan research institution at the University of Chicago. The self-funded poll, conducted in November 2019, included 1,020 interviews with a representative sample of U.S. households. Researchers cited a 2019 City University of New York-Harvard study, which noted that medical bills are the most common basis for declaring personal bankruptcy.
Some experts contend that crowdfunding platforms should serve as gatekeepers in prohibiting campaigns for unproven treatments. Facing a dire diagnosis, individuals may go out on a limb to try anything and everything to prolong and improve the quality of their lives.
They may enroll in well-designed clinical trials, or they could fall prey "to snake oil being sold by people out there just making a buck," says Jeremy Snyder, a health sciences professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, and the lead author of a December 2019 article in The Hastings Report about crowdfunding for dubious treatments.
For instance, crowdfunding campaigns have sought donations for homeopathic healing for cancer, unapproved stem cell therapy for central nervous system injury, and extended antibiotic use for chronic Lyme disease, according to an October 2018 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Ford Vox, the lead author and an Atlanta-based physician specializing in brain injury, maintains that a repository should exist to monitor the outcomes of experimental treatments. "At the very least, there ought to be some tracking of what happens to the people the funds are being raised for," he says. "It would be great for an independent organization to do so."
"Even if it appears like a good cause, consumers should still do some research before donating to a crowdfunding campaign."
The Federal Trade Commission, the national consumer watchdog, cautions online that "it might be impossible for you to know if the cause is real and if the money actually gets to the intended recipient." Another caveat: Donors can't deduct contributions to individuals on tax returns.
"Even if it appears like a good cause, consumers should still do some research before donating to a crowdfunding campaign," says Malini Mithal, associate director of financial practices at the FTC. "Don't assume all medical treatments are tested and safe."
Before making any donation, it would be wise to check whether a crowdfunding site offers some sort of guarantee if a campaign ends up being fraudulent, says Kristin Judge, chief executive and founder of the Cybercrime Support Network, a Michigan-based nonprofit that serves victims before, during, and after an incident. They should know how the campaign organizer is related to the intended recipient and note whether any direct family members and friends have given funds and left supportive comments.
Donating to vetted charities offers more assurance than crowdfunding that the money will be channeled toward helping someone in need, says Daniel Billingsley, vice president of external affairs for the Oklahoma Center of Nonprofits. "Otherwise, you could be putting money into all sorts of scams." There is "zero accountability" for the crowdfunding site or the recipient to provide proof that the dollars were indeed funneled into health-related expenses.
Even if donors may have limited recourse against scammers, the "platforms have an ethical obligation to protect the people using their site from fraud," says Bryanna Moore, a postdoctoral fellow at Baylor College of Medicine's Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy. "It's easy to take advantage of people who want to be charitable."
There are "different layers of deception" on a broad spectrum of fraud, ranging from "outright lying for a self-serving reason" to publicizing an imaginary illness to collect money genuinely needed for basic living expenses. With medical campaigns being a top category among crowdfunding appeals, it's "a lot of money that's exchanging hands," Moore says.
The advent of crowdfunding "reveals and, in some ways, reinforces a health care system that is totally broken," says Jessica Pierce, a faculty affiliate in the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver. "The fact that people have to scrounge for money to get life-saving treatment is unethical."
Crowdfunding also highlights socioeconomic and racial disparities by giving an unfair advantage to those who are social-media savvy and capable of crafting a compelling narrative that attracts donors. Privacy issues enter into the picture as well, because telling that narrative entails revealing personal details, Pierce says, particularly when it comes to children, "who may not be able to consent at a really informed level."
CoFund Health, the crowdfunding site on which Anderson raised the money for his plastic surgery, offers to help people write their campaigns and copy edit for proper language, says Matthew Martin, co-founder and chief executive officer. Like other crowdfunding sites, it retains a few percent of the donations for each campaign. Martin is the husband of Anderson's acquaintance from high school.
So far, the site, which is based in Raleigh, North Carolina, has hosted about 600 crowdfunding campaigns, some completed and some still in progress. Campaigns have raised as little as $300 to cover immediate dental expenses and as much as $12,000 for cancer treatments, Martin says, but most have set a goal between $5,000 and $10,000.
Whether or not someone's campaign is based on fact or fiction remains for prospective donors to decide.
The services could be cosmetic—for example, a breast enhancement or reduction, laser procedures for the eyes or skin, and chiropractic care. A number of campaigns have sought funding for transgender surgeries, which many insurers consider optional, he says.
In July 2019, a second site was hatched out of pet owners' requests for assistance with their dogs' and cats' medical expenses. Money raised on CoFund My Pet can only be used at veterinary clinics. Martin says the debit card would be declined at other merchants, just as its CoFund Health counterpart for humans will be rejected at places other than health care facilities, dental and vision providers, and pharmacies.
Whether or not someone's campaign is based on fact or fiction remains for prospective donors to decide. If a donor were to regret a transaction, he says the site would reach out to the campaign's owner but ultimately couldn't force a refund, Martin explains, because "it's hard to chase down fraud without having access to people's health records."
In some crowdfunding campaigns, the individual needs some or all the donated resources to pay for travel and lodging at faraway destinations to receive care, says Snyder, the health sciences professor and crowdfunding report author. He suggests people only give to recipients they know personally.
"That may change the calculus a little bit," tipping the decision in favor of donating, he says. As long as the treatment isn't harmful, the funds are a small gesture of support. "There's some value in that for preserving hope or just showing them that you care."