Clover Health, an insurance startup trying to use data to keep customers healthy
This orientation towards data is admirable, but likely is an impossibly uphill climb without a corresponding emphasis upon <i>expanding</i> collected types of data. Which is expensive. And is why US insurance companies---who pay for this kind of data out of tests---won&#x27;t be leading the charge towards a data-centric or Big-Data-centric health outcomes evolution in the medical field. The mainstream medical field has not yet recognized the possibilities, either.<p>Let&#x27;s take the Type 2 diabetes example given in the article.<p>No mention is made of putting a Continuous Glucose Monitor on the 83-year old patient, to graphically show in real time the impact white rice has upon her blood sugar.<p>No mention is made of five additional antibodies tests to identify Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults (LADA), which looks <i>a lot</i> like Type 2 in its early stages, but likely needs to be treated as Type 1 as early as feasible according to some very recent research.<p>No mention is made of regular tracking of her HbA1c, fructosamine (gives a 14-day instead of ~115 day window into long-term blood sugar management), and 1,5-anhydroglucitol (indicates time spent with hyperglycemia).<p>Not to speak of doing those three areas on a regular, monthly&#x2F;quarterly basis. It is very rare in the US to do all of that even on an annual basis; at best, the common practice is HbA1c once a year. While metabolic syndrome leading to diabetes is a huge drain on US insurers, aggressive data-led syndrome reversion is <i>de facto</i> not recognized by either the mainstream medical field nor insurance industry.<p>There is lots more data they could gather than what I mentioned here, but all they did instead was suggest &quot;try to eat brown instead of white rice&quot;. She should try not eat rice (and other carb-heavy food) <i>at all</i> for a month, and see if that improves her blood sugar numbers. While the fitness community has already empirically identified that diet is 90% of success unless you are a genetic anomaly, the food, medical and insurance industries still push the idea upon patients they need to go out and exercise more, and only tinker around the edges of their diets (unless you are fasting&#x2F;caloric-restricting, going very low-carb, going vegetarian, going raw food, <i>etc.</i>, most Americans idea of a diet change by adding a couple salads a week, picking &quot;low fat&quot; packaged food and so on is just tinkering).<p>This doesn&#x27;t even get into monitoring controlled changes in habits, measuring the impact upon the data, and using those results to guide further changes. Nor have we even touched upon the lack of incentives in the US for companies seeking to &quot;disrupt&quot; medicine through holistic, integrated process changes instead of &quot;product&quot; like pharma or medical devices: if company X can provably intake Y number of customers with say, metabolic syndrome or even Type 2 diabetes, and achieve a reversion rate of Z% with negligible (&lt;5%) backsliding 5+ years out from date of reversion, monetizing that proprietary process is limited to either being a provider (in which case you&#x27;re squeezed by the insurance companies with take-it-or-leave-it negotiations) or an insurer (in which case you&#x27;re too spread out covering other ailments to really capitalize upon the proprietary knowledge). I suspect the lack of incentive structures is similar in nations with national health plans.