Smart innovations yield accessible, affordable healthcare

Part #2 of the Bill Gates Letter

The Gates Foundation has made significant improvement to health equity with their investments in countries overseas and some of the partnerships they were able to secure that helps with access to care, medical equipment, vaccines, health guidelines, supplies and other essentials needed to meet the benchmark of a decent lifestyle. For more advanced nations, the next steps are to continue to grow and shift to proactive care by using advanced technologies to help predict, prevent illness and offer precise medicine for all. With the vast amount of medical data available within EMR systems, there are opportunities to help predict illnesses from occurring in the first place and help physicians use technologies that will enhance the patient experience, better patient outcomes, and lower the cost of care for healthcare institutions.

In the United States alone, healthcare spending makes up almost 20% of the GDP which equates to $4.5 trillion in 2022 and is growing. About $220 Billion dollars goes towards cardiovascular disease cost of care and reports state that the numbers will only increase. With programs that reflect value based care which can help deter healthcare institutions from reactive based care to proactive based care and medicare incentivizes physicians to help lower the cost of care. There are shared savings programs that Medicare has announced and that has spurred the healthcare industry to change the way they think of healthcare and invest more towards digital health tools and services. In the startup world, many startups started to target domains such as: Cardiovascular Disease, Cancer, Mental Health, Stroke, Ophthalmology, Surgery etc.

ScriptChain Health uses AI to predict Heart Disease Readmission which is a large problem that aligns directly with Value Based Care. Readmission rates in the US are shockingly high that can go as high as ~33% within a 30 day time frame depending on the patient’s condition and demographic data. Hospitals have been getting fined by the government to reduce their readmission rates and insurance companies have been cutting their reimbursements for patient care when patients get readmitted for the same illness. That cost then gets allocated to healthcare institutions’ bottom line that eats into their profits. Many healthcare systems have lost billions of dollars annually due to large variable costs on their balance sheets and some healthcare systems are putting technologies to the test to help reduce healthcare costs and allocate the right resources to the correct patient. ScriptChain Health uses state-of-the-art deep learning models to not only identify high risk patients for clinicians but to then recommend treatment options to optimize the patient stay and discharge with more confidence. With the prediction platform, clinicians can utilize the hospital’s resources more effectively on a per patient basis which can result in lower cost drivers.

Heart Failure is a very difficult disease to manage and tends to have the highest readmission rate. One case study to understand how ScriptChain Health’s product uses AI for the physician setting is as follows:

Use Case:

Case Manager Lisa has 3 patients (Mr. Thurber, Mrs. Johnson, and Mr. Danner) who were admitted with CHF and are now scheduled for discharge today. In an effort to decrease readmission the hospital has implemented standard post-discharge CHF care. Each patient will receive a phone call from a nurse in 72 hrs to check up on the patient, have a nurse visit the patient at home 1 week post-discharge, and will be scheduled to see their physician in 2 weeks after discharge.

However, Lisa’s hospital has now implemented ScriptChain which uses AI and deep machine learning to more acutely predict each patient’s risk of getting readmitted to the hospital in 30 days with another CHF exacerbation. Using ScriptChain, Lisa can now determine that Mr. Thurber had a 90% of readmission while Mrs. Johnson has a 50% risk and Mr. Danner has a 10% risk. This allows Lisa to personalize post-discharge CHF care and better allocate resources in a more efficient and effective manner. The post-discharge care changes from the standard protocol in the follow ways:

Mr. Thurber: nurse call in 24 hrs and then weekly for 30 days, home nurse visit in 72hrs, CHF clinic office visit in 1 week, physician office visit in 2 weeks

Mrs. Johnson: nurse call in 72hrs, home nurse visit 1 week, physician office visit at 2 weeks

Mr. Danner: nurse call in 1 week, physician office visit at 4 weeks

Sure enough, none of these patients are readmitted in 30 days. Given Mr. Thurber’s significantly high risk of readmission, he received more intensive post-discharge care to ensure the patient is getting the care he needs at home. Mrs. Johnson is average risk and receives the standard protocol. As Mr Danner has a very low risk of readmission, he does not need all the resources provided. ScriptChain has allowed better resource allocation resulting in improved patient care and decreasing readmissions. With the reduced readmission and improved resource allocation, Lisa’s hospital has saved millions of dollars.

That not only reduces cost of care for everyone involved but betters patient outcomes in the process by focusing on the higher risk patients and taking the right steps towards providing the right education, follow ups, and additional care. To provide a better user experience, ScriptChain Health invested heavily in research to figure out how they can ensure ease of use of the application and create efficiency for adoption. Many clinicians surveyed said they would not use any products if it causes inefficiencies in their work setting and make sure it is not “heavy looking.” That set up how we designed our product by putting our UI/UX at the forefront of software development and making sure it integrates into EMR systems instead of using another browser to get access to the product.

Taking everything into account, Bill Gates see’s a bright future with the use of AI to help solve some of the world’s largest problems and making smart investments to help achieve those goals. ScriptChain Health is making sure to use AI with the prediction platform to help lower the cost of care for heart disease and better patient outcomes.

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