Heart Failure can hit anytime, anywhere.

Straight to The Heart of Rising Healthcare Costs

Healthcare, Employers & Employees: Straight to the Heart 

In the United States, most working-age people get their health insurance through work, and over the years, endless opinions have been voiced regarding this. Economists, politicians, employers, and even workers complain about the shortcomings of this system. Going back far enough, you would probably find the notion that this system would reduce the healthcare burden from the countries' economy while improving the outcomes for the employees and their families.

The Cost of Rising Costs

Healthcare coverage is the largest employee-related expense for U.S. employers, and the cost of healthcare for the individual employee is becoming increasingly unaffordable. 

Private industry employer costs for insurance benefits averaged $2.65 per hour worked or 7.3% of total compensation.

The average cost of employer-sponsored health insurance for annual premiums was $7,188 for single coverage. On average, employers paid 82% of the premium ($5,946 a year). Employees paid the remaining 18% (1,242 a year).

The average cost of employer-sponsored health insurance for Family coverage was $20,576 on average. 70% or $14,561. Employees paid the remaining 30% or $6,015 a year.

In the last 5 years, the average premium for employer-sponsored family health coverage increased 22% and 54% over the last ten years.

Over the years, stakeholders have been monitoring and addressing the healthcare system and its flaws. Also, employers and employees have come together to try novel approaches to improve the health insurance system and ensure it offers optimum benefits at a friendly cost. Some have initiated strategies like working directly with health systems and demonstrated significant savings compared with competitors. But none have made a significant impact on the cost of overall health care.

Hundreds of studies tried to check the relationship between employer-provided health insurance and actual employee health.  Results showed that employers have steadily shifted costs to employees, and the percentage of employers offering health care coverage has dropped in the past few years.

A Change Needed – Where To Start?

Generally, about one-third of employees don't understand their healthcare coverage, and their employers aren't stepping in to educate them. Studies found that there is a relationship between employee healthcare literacy and increasing costs to employers. Helping employees understand how to use what they have is the first step; not just to reduce cost but to improve the condition of their health. To reduce cost and increase health at the same time, employers need to promote health care consumerism. They should provide employees with the tools and education to make a healthy daily living. When the employee uses his health care, he would be more conscious of the costs and would have an incentive to reduce those costs when it's possible.

How to Change a Life

Developing and creating realistic health improvement programs will undoubtedly have a great impact on life. Statistically, 70% of health care spending is attributed to behavioral and lifestyle choices, and this proves that wellness programs are important and can help employees' chronic conditions (high glucose, obesity, and cholesterol). Another option is motivating certain health and wellness activities (health risk assessments, stop smoking programs, weight-loss). 

The Future is NOT Set. If You Can Pre-See.

Cardiovascular Diseases (CVD) are the major diseases that are killing Americans. They place a troublesome burden on American businesses and families. Every 36 seconds, a person dies from cardiovascular disease; that's one-third of all deaths in the U.S. According to CDC, hypertension-related absenteeism costs employers $10.3 billion per year, obesity-related absenteeism costs employers $11.2 billion per year, and physical inactivity costs U.S. employers $9.1 billion per year. This can be changed.

We are PreSee.

We provide the technology that allows on-site testing and early detection of Cardiovascular Diseases in employees. We enable the fast and economical screening of large numbers of employees with the aim to detect early signs of CVD.

Combining our screening protocol with advanced diagnostic equipment helps to cover multiple aspects of cardiovascular risks. Our AI-based algorithms have the ability to self-analyze multiple data points and swiftly connect the dots to achieve diagnostic sensitivity.

Having an affordable, smarter, and more effective screening saves millions of dollars for employees, but even more important is saving heartbreaks for employees and their families. 

Changing the Future Today with Early CVD Detection

Changing the Future Today with Earlly Cardiovascular Disease Detection

Universally, the impact of Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) is staggering. The numbers provided by the CDC for the US alone are almost impossible to grasp. CVD is the leading cause of death for men, women, and people of most racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Every 36 seconds, one person dies in the United States from CVD. About 655,000 Americans die from heart disease each year; that’s more than the number of deaths from COVID19 since the beginning of the pandemic. Each year, Cardiovascular Disease costs the United States about $219 billion; this includes the cost of health care services, medicines, and lost productivity due to death. Health care expenditures are overwhelming where costs are skyrocketing, predominantly because of the escalating costs for advanced disease.

Unfortunately, CVD is identified as an incurable disease that can only be managed. This problem gets exacerbated because, in most cases, the disease does not show visible symptoms until it has progressed significantly. However, if caught early enough, it will be prevented from causing greater damages and be better controlled. 

Under the CVD umbrella, there are disorders that shorten life expectancy, such as myocardial infarction and ischemia, heart failure, stroke, renal failure, peripheral vascular disease, sudden death and dementia, in all of which atherothrombotic disease is the most common cause. 

New insights into mechanisms of progressive cardiovascular disease, innovative technologies to assess it, and effective therapy to slow its progression have been prominent research accomplishments over the past years.

Holes in the screening process

CVD remains the main cause of morbidity and mortality, and consequently, early diagnosis is of paramount importance. The goal should be simple; screen as many as you can to detect the disease early, even before it starts. But the traditional screening philosophy has built-in flaws.

Traditionally, detection of CVD as described by the NHS involves series of stages. The first stage is risk assessment for CVD and specifically heart attack, which is carried out if a doctor suspects that a patient is at risk of developing the disease. During this stage, the doctor questions patient about his/her medical and family history, blood pressure, and cholesterol level. Sometimes, doctors might ask questions about the patient’s lifestyle.

Only when elevated risk is established in the first stage, then the doctor would recommend moving to the second stage of diagnosing CVD. This stage is composed of a series of sequential tests to confirm the presence of the disease. These tests are commonly blood tests, electrocardiogram (ECG), echocardiogram, CT, MRI, and coronary angiography. 

The goal of risk assessment is to determine the ability of an individual to sustain a cardiovascular morbid during their productive lifetime and those in whom therapy should be introduced to protect them from a likely event.

The problem with this protocol is that the screening can not be done at a large scale. Many go undetected because they do not “fit the profile” that would take them from stage one to stage two. moreover, common halthcare guidelines for screening aim to balance effectiveness and cost, suggesting screening to start with low-cost tests that are often of low efficacy. Only people who are found with a higher probability of having a certain disease are directed to more effective and more expensive tests. The nature of many diseases, especially CVD, is that many go undetected by the initial tests and are subsequently dismissed as healthy. 

Technology for a paradigm shift

Is it possible to do mass screening with effective testing that is safe and quick? At PreSee we improve the precision for early detection and diagnosis by detecting markers of early Cardiovascular Disease and assessing disease progression. We combine cutting edge point of care testing equipment with smart AI-powered interpretation to alert when higher risk or actual disease signs are detected.

An appropriate testing protocol coupled with strong AI support (acting as the physician’s assistant) is what helps detect and diagnose the onset of a broad-range of heart diseases. This is the platfom to achieve effective large scale screening of asymptomatic patients.

Identifying early vascular and cardiac functional and structural abnormalities recognizes the high prevalence of abnormalities in asymptomatic individuals without clear-cut risk factors for cardiovascular disease. These are the people that would slip through the holes of the traditional screening system.

At PreSee we believe that an appropriate testing protocol needs to detect and diagnose the onset of a “broad-range” of heart disease, coupled with strong AI support acting as the physician’s assistant. Only then can it be considered effective for extensive screening of asymptomatic people.

AI: Changing The Game, Changing the Score

AI is The Present. And the Future

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool for better health care offers unprecedented opportunities to improve patient and clinical outcomes, reduce costs, and impact population health.

Generally, Artificial Intelligence applies to computational technologies that emulate mechanisms assisted by human intelligence, such as thought, deep learning, adaptation, engagement, and sensory understanding. Some AI devices can execute a role that typically involves human interpretation and decision-making. 

In recent years, interest and advances in medical AI applications have surged due to the substantially enhanced computing power of modern computers and the vast amount of digital data available for collection and utilization. Electronic medical records have become the standard norm, from the smallest clinic to the largest hospital or healthcare system. This data repository can now be used to train AI systems to identify subtle signs of illnesses and point to the best care option, and ultimately to save suffering and lives. 

AI: A Game Changer in Early Detection and Treatment

Going a few years back in time, when AI was just emerging and showing early signs of potential, a big debate broke out.  Stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem were debating if AI would reach a stage where it would surpass human judgment. Today, however, the debate is obsolete; ask any practicing healthcare professional. Undoubtedly, AI is changing medical practice today, and there are several AI applications in medicine that can be used in a variety of medical fields, such as clinical, diagnostic, rehabilitative, surgical, and predictive practices. 

Another critical area of medicine where AI is making an impact today is clinical decision-making and disease diagnosis. AI technologies can ingest, analyze, and report large volumes of data across different modalities to detect disease and guide clinical decisions.

 AI applications can deal with the vast amount of data produced in medicine and find new information that would otherwise remain hidden in big medical data. One such area is connecting the dots between different tests performed on a single patient and similar tests done over different times. To an AI machine, it makes perfect sense as it looks at the raw data level and can interpret and compare different data types. This gives additional depth to what was previously considered isolated data sources and allows to detect and diagnose both acute and potentially chronic diseases.

AI in the heart of cardiovascular healthcare

Cardiovascular Disease is the first cause of death in the US. Battling this illness presents healthcare professionals with major diagnosis challenges throughout the disease life cycle. When a patient arrives at the ER complaining of chest pains- the immediate diagnosis of myocardial infarction (aka heart attack) can make the difference between life and death. AI can help make this difference by using sensitive AI software to interpret and detect arrhythmias presented in ECG. But the real key to changing an outcome happens years before. It involves applying AI to reach early detection of risk factors and early signs of illness. This is what PreSee does—performing cost-effective mass screening and using AI to increase sensitivity by connecting the dots. The risk factors for Cardiovascular Disease are well known. Some are lifestyle-dependent, and others are in our genes. In either case, much can be done to change the outcome if the illness is detected early enough.

The Next Frontier: Cancer Early Detection

Much like Cardiovascular Disease, cancer in its many forms is a life-threatening illness, which is diagnosed too late in many cases. The power of AI is now directed towards screening for genetic disposition, detecting early signs, and matching patients with the best treatments available for their specific disease. Just like cardiovascular disease, cancer has been linked with several lifestyle behaviors (some actually overlap). The odds for overcoming the disease rise exponentially if diagnosed and treated early. AI-powered systems can make a difference in many such cases.

Allowing mass screening for cancer is our next frontier at PreSee.