Zatient®
Making intelligent health decisions®
Zatient® is an intelligent decision assistant for people concerned about acute or chronic medical conditions. It enables healthcare consumers to more confidently undertake their journey of care and survivorship.
New tests, treatments, and guidelines regularly enter the marketplace. However, many patients aren’t benefiting from evolving “best practices.” Zatient empowers patients to make good decisions based on custom-tailored knowledge and state-of-the-art medicine, while remaining consistent with their needs, preferences, and values.
Zatient is available as a free web application at zatient.com. Currently, Zatient supports those who have healthcare concerns about prostate cancer, including screening, diagnosis, treatment, and beyond. Other conditions are in the development pipeline.
Patient revolution driven by technology
“The structure, incentives, and culture of the health care system are poorly aligned to engage patients and respond to their needs. …new approaches are needed to deliver the right information, in a clear and understandable format, to patients and clinicians as they partner to make clinical decisions” — National Academy of Medicine
The reality of healthcare in America
Poor population health
Almost half of those over 65 receive treatment for at least one chronic disease, and more than 20 percent receive treatment for multiple chronic diseases (Schneider et al., 2009); fully 75 million people in the United States have multiple chronic conditions (Parekh and Barton, 2010).
High cost of care
Health care spending in the U.S. far exceeds that of other peer countries, on average $9,000 per person versus $6,300 for Switzerland, the next highest spender (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD Health Data 2015).
Americans spend more than $210 billion annually for unnecessary medical tests and treatments (National Academy of Medicine, 2010).
The risks and expenses of medical tests are treatments are often underestimated (American College of Physicians).
“Overdiagnosis” is when a test gives you a diagnosis that is unlikely to ever affect your health, and it may be better not have the test at all, particularly when it results in unnecessary treatment or testing (American College of Physicians).
Healthcare inefficiencies
It would take an estimated 21 hours per day for individual primary care physicians to provide all of the care recommended to meet their patients’ acute, preventive, and chronic disease management needs (Yarnall et al., 2009).
Medicare patients now see an average of seven physicians, including five specialists, split among four different practices (Pham et al., 2007).
Without meaningful and trustworthy sources of information on costs and outcomes of care, patients and consumers cannot make fully informed decisions.
Unsatisfactory patient experience
If medical error was a disease, it would rank as the third leading cause of death in the U.S. (Markary and Daniel, 2016)
Although healthcare spending in the U.S. far exceeds that of other peer countries, Americans experience poorer outcomes. “The health disadvantage is pervasive—it affects all age groups up to age 75 and is observed for multiple disease, biological and behavioral risk factors, and injuries.” (National Academy of Medicine, 2013; U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health)
A decade after the National Academy of Medicine (1999) estimated that 44,000 to 98,000 patients died each year from preventable medical errors, recent studies have reported that as many as one-third of hospitalized patients may experience harm or an adverse event, often from preventable errors (Classen et al., 2011; Landrigan et al., 2010; Levinson, 2010).
If all states could provide care of the quality delivered by the highest-performing state, an estimated 75,000 fewer deaths would have occurred across the country in 2005 (McCarthy et al., 2009; Schoenbaum et al., 2011).
…when [patients] are encouraged to play a role in decisions about their care, they often lack understandable, reliable information—from evidence on the efficacy and risks of different treatment options to information on the quality of different providers and health care organizations—that is customized to their needs, preferences, and health goals (Fagerlin et al., 2010; Lee et al., 2011, 2012; Sepucha et al., 2010).
A study of guidelines for the 10 most common types of cancer found that only 6 percent of the guidelines’ recommendations were based on a high level of evidence with uniform consensus (Poonacha and Go, 2011).
An examination of 51 guidelines for treating lung cancer, for example, found that less than a third of the recommendations were evidence based (Harpole et al., 2003; National Academy of Medicine, 2009a).