How Aetna harnesses its data to help breast cancer patients
FHP: How involved does Aetna plan to be in the conversations once two people have been connected?
Steinberg: We do not follow or monitor these folks once they make their connections. After they're connected, they're kind of on their own. We're planning to follow up on the back end from an analytical perspective, including how people feel about it and objective data regarding things like utilization and cost that we can measure. But there's no ongoing refereeing of conversations they have with each other.
Jones: We're running the program for six months, and then we're going to survey individuals on the satisfaction of the program--matching, ease of navigating the system, among other factors.
FHP: Who is eligible to participate in the program?
Jones: Any Aetna member who has or has had breast cancer can sign up. That's the only prerequisite to being enrolled in the program. But we're reaching out to our entire population, and there are thousands who are identified as being candidates. We're still in the beginning stages of the communication strategy that we're using to reach out to individuals.
FHP: What's the benefit that Aetna hopes to gain from offering the CarePal program?
Kolodziej: First of all, we would like to believe that we want to do the right thing for the right reasons. The main reason that we typically target Aetna members for a lot of the work we do is purely a data logistic-driven one--meaning that, if we're interested in following anything that has to do with utilization and cost analysis, then, by definition, we only have that information on Aetna members. That said, the benefit of CarePal, I think, is doing the right thing for people from an emotional perspective, particularly in conditions such as breast cancer, where the emotional overlay is understandably very grave. That in and of itself is an important and useful goal.
Second, and definitely not least, it turns out in most cases in medicine that, when you do the right thing from a clinical perspective, not only is it better because it leads to better outcomes, it often means better economics.
Here's an anecdote: I've learned that, when breast cancer patients make decisions about their care, they get input from a lot of sources. It's interesting that, for some reason, there's often a disconnect between what the doctor tells the patient and what's actually important to the patient and what informs their decision-making. For example, a lot of women with breast cancer who undergo chemotherapy have constipation as a common side effect. Why's that important? If that patient gets constipated and has talked frankly with someone else who has already been through the same thing, she won't go to the ER for the constipation. She will know this is supposed to happen and can deal with it, since she know it's normal.
We can do good here, even in ways that you can't necessarily predict or articulate. But at the end of the day, if we have patients who are willing to share their experiences, it can help other patients make good decisions.
FHP: Have you identified any goals you want to reach in order to consider CarePal's pilot is successful?
Steingberg: If we can show there's a material improvement in subjective well-being, as we're going to be measuring it, with either no change or an improvement in overall utilization and cost, that would be counted as a victory. The key element to achieving success is that, hopefully, enough people will want to join that we can make a statistically meaningful statement--either way, quite frankly--on the benefit of this approach. I think we intuitively believe that a data-driven, matching approach to this and potentially other diseases is an intellectually appropriate way to go, but we need to formally prove it out. At the end of the day, that's going to require enough belly buttons, if you will, to join up.
[Editor's Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]
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