Can This Tool Really Predict Health Costs?

Paul H. Flowers Jr. built Crystal Ball, a tool that predicts health costs for employer groups by comparing early-stage versus late-stage treatment of chronic diseases. A demo with 800 Illinois employees shows how early detection of conditions like diabetes and heart failure can save millions while keeping insurance rates down.
Chapters
All right, I'd just like to take you on a quick tour of the tool that I developed while working with Fountain Health. I named it the crystal ball because it can reasonably predict the amount of claims inside an employer group and note what that expense would be if they were to treat it at an early stage versus late stage, and also showing a delta. So let me just hop right in. Go ahead and sign in first. And we've got a couple of ways to look at this. We've got it by age, and then we also can drill down by county. So what an employer would do is take a look at their employee population, say they have about 800 employees. Now, we're not going to look at all chronic conditions. We'll look at the ones that are most notable and the ones that have really, really high claims: cancer, diabetes, Heart failure is another one that shows up quite often, and then ischemic heart disease. Noting all genders gonna be, again, what's assigned at birth, male or female, and then age group typically is gonna be in the under 65 population. Now let's just look at this for the great state of Illinois. So what you see down below is that there is an instance of cancer in about 3.5% of that population, 28% diabetes, 12% heart failure, 17% ischemic heart failure. And this is an 800-member population that's in an employer group inside the state of Illinois. And look at the potentially affected members in each one of these categories. So what we've known is that from an early-stage treatment, when you're able to diagnose, detect, and deter these conditions from worsening, the cost again for this specific group, about 28 people with certain cancers, about $1.8 million. Treating this at a later stage looks at about $6.1 million, with the savings of $4 million by choosing early detection over late detection. And again, those numbers just get a little bit more astonishing when you look at things like diabetes, and especially once you hop into heart failure. Uh, so how this data was derived was we took the prevalence of these chronic conditions from the CMS data and superimposed it over the population within in a particular state, notice that those conditions and the instances of things happening that are worsening happen when you, when you see more conditions stacked on each other. So this is just again the Crystal Ball tool. And look at those numbers. It's astonishing, absolutely astonishing. If you wanted to drill down by county, we can do that also. So again, we'll look at an employer with about 800 employees, let's say. 800 employees. Chronic conditions, again, we're going to set for the ones that have some of the highest claims that we've been able to step in front of. And let's see, that's ischemic and then some heart failure there as well. We'll look at this for, again, the great state of Illinois, but this time what we'll do is drill down to the county known as Cook. And here in Cook County We'll take a look again. Wow, even more prevalence again within this specific county where again out of an 800 population you'd have about 76 instances of cancer. And now this isn't to say that 76 people right now have cancer, but statistically speaking over their working years these are what will develop again over the time. So with that 5 million being the early stage cost, $16 million being the later stage cost. Stepping in and having a preventative measure, an actual proactive type of approach, and looking at their healthcare can save the plan itself over $11 million over time. And what that's going to do is that's going to keep the rates down, that's going to keep the employees happier, and that'll keep them living substantially longer. So this is the crystal ball tool that I developed for Fountain Health. And again, my name is Paul H. Flowers Jr., a pleasure sharing you with this— sharing this with you today. You can reach me at info@superiorinsuranceadvisors.com. That's my personal company for which I do contracted work through. You can also reach me on my personal cell phone, area code 202-704-3740, for business inquiries. And you can also take a look at my site which is Paul H. Flowers Jr., again, www.paul.hflowersjr.com. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Bye for now.
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