Cara Health believes that a high-tech analysis of a person’s answer to “How are you?” can predict the chance of readmission to the hospital.
The company is hoping to help elderly people who have multiple health problems with their high-touch, low-cost system.
Their solution for reducing readmissions relies on phone calls and linguistic analysis. A patient care representative has a list of people to call and a script to guide part of the conversation.
With the Rise of AI, What IP Disputes in Healthcare Are Likely to Emerge?
Munck Wilson Mandala Partner Greg Howison shared his perspective on some of the legal ramifications around AI, IP, connected devices and the data they generate, in response to emailed questions.
“We are trying to determine what direction the person’s journey is headed in: Is he worried about his sister or his caregiver or his dog?” Dr. Carmel Martin said. “These things often precede an event that might send the person back to the hospital.”
The call is recorded and the interaction is analyzed to look for signs that the person’s health is getting worse. This analysis produces a report that is flagged “clinician” or “nonclinician.” This determines who needs to make the follow-up call.
“This solution addresses the inefficient use of high-value clinicians and ineffective risk stratification,” Martin said. “It also recognizes the fact that most cost drivers occur outside healthcare settings.”
CEO Enda Madden said the company conducted a trial there with 300 patients over 18 months. As of April, the company had processed more than 8,000 calls. Results showed 51 percent avoidable admissions reduction and 98 percent patient satisfaction.
A Personalized Approach to Medication Nonadherence
At the Abarca Forward conference earlier this year, George Van Antwerp, managing director at Deloitte, discussed how social determinants of health and a personalized member experience can improve medication adherence and health outcomes.
“Our algorithm picks up conversational features and compares those features against a big database of calls,” Madden said. “That’s how we make our predictions.”
Cara Health has had a busy year so far. Martin and Madden presented at Healthbox’s Investor Day in April , won a finalist spot in Janssen Healthcare Innovation’s Connected Care Challenge and will be competing for $100,000 Thursday on Janssen’s Demo Day in New York.
During the Healthbox presentation, Martin laid out the size of the readmission problem: $48 billion on avoidable admissions and $20 billion on readmissions, according to the Institute of Medicine.
“We are targeting integrated health systems that are not constrained by fee for service,” Madden said. “Our basic fee will be $10 per member per month. We’ll also offer premium services such as Web-based analytics.”
The company started in Ireland. Madden has a background in software engineering and computational linguistics. Martin is an urgent care doctor and public health researcher. Kevin Smith joined Martin and Madden when the Cara Health team moved to Chicago at the start of this year for the Healthbox accelerator program.
Follow Madden’s tweets here and Cara Health’s here. Keep an eye on his tweets tomorrow to see how Cara Health fares in the Janssen competition.
If you can’t watch the live stream of the Janssen Demo Day, watch Cara Health’s presentation at Healthbox Investor Day.
