Frequently Asked Questions
We know that you have a lot of questions about Life2 and Claustrum AI. We've organized many questions that we hear into the four categories below. If you have any questions, we would love to be able to talk to you about outcomes that matter to you.
Why was Life2 Founded?
Healthcare is complex. Worldwide healthcare data doubles every 72 days. Complexity creates risk and risk limits performance. This challenge is far beyond the capabilities of human problem solving. New technologies are needed.
What is Life2's Vision?
Monetization of all data across all healthcare market sectors.
What is Life2’s Mission?
Optimizing outcomes through real-time analysis of existing data, enabling greater clinical, operational and financial efficiencies.
What does Life2 do?
Life2 provides Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning outcome analytics services, extracting meaning from diverse data sets to deliver real-time, per-person/event optimization interventions.
What is Life2’s value proposition?
The multi-trillion dollar worldwide healthcare market revolves around outcomes. Outcomes involve understanding the interrelated complexities of risk, cost and opportunity associated with each unique human being. Every outcome – whether good or bad – drives all the financial metrics. It should be the goal of the entire healthcare industry to optimize outcomes. Life2 technology does just that – we optimize all clinical, operational and financial outcomes.
How does Life2 optimize outcomes?
We specialize in “outcome analytics” – utilizing proprietary AI and machine learning technology that sits at the apex of data analysis. The platform aggregates, organizes and analyses data to provide continuous, per-person, real-time interventions that optimize desired future outcomes.
How would you describe Life2’s technology in “non-technical” terms?
The Company’s platform is nothing short of a novel and powerful “healthcare GPS”. We expect the GPS technology we use when we drive to provide us with real-time updates that optimize the route we are taking as to avoid delays and minimize safety concerns. Life2 applies that concept to healthcare. The application potential across all sectors of the healthcare market is limitless.
What are the company’s target areas?
Our initial focus is in two key healthcare sectors: payers & providers (hospitals).
What is Life2’s business model?
Life2’s business model is “Insights as a Service”. We take structured and unstructured data and turn that into person-based insights (interventions/actions) that optimize outcomes. This runs as a service in the cloud and feeds directly into our online portal and our clients’ workflow applications.
What is the pricing?
Subscription-based, monthly license fees on a “per basis” (per insured life, per hospital discharge, per emergency department admission, per processed claims, etc.).
What is the distribution strategy?
We work directly with end-user clients as well as channel partners, consultants, insurance companies, insurance brokers, third party administrators, care management firms and stop/loss carriers. We also work with technology companies interested in licensing our technology into their offerings via private
label.
Can Life2 truly add value to any area of healthcare?
Healthcare is quite unlike any other industry. The six market sectors – life sciences, suppliers, providers, payers, consumers, regulatory – are tightly interwoven. Added to this is the complication that every human being and therefore every healthcare event is uniquely complex. Healthcare is complex.
Complexity creates risk. Risk kills performance. Life2 mitigates risk and optimizes performance.
We have a lot of data – can Life2 help us monetize it?
Data management in healthcare is witnessing a new phase, moving beyond simply storing data to a focus on extracting insights that can be monetized – and support key priorities such as population health management and value-based care. Increased use of Data-as a-Platform (DaaP) to extract insights from all data sources will be area of interest for most health care players. That is the Life2 sweetspot.
What is the Life2 Platform?
The platform provides a common method for storing, analyzing and reporting all information for each unique person and any outcome event. This allows for granular “per-person/per-event” outcome analytics. This is achieved via a continuous cycle that takes into account that risk, cost and opportunity are dynamic and require real-time analysis in order to optimize desired outcomes. The platform utilizes deep domain expertise in the use of large-scale datasets, advanced modeling techniques and the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Life2 creates value by calculating real-time, continuous-feed, per-person interventions that shape and optimize immediate and future healthcare outcomes across the continuum. Clinical, operational, regulatory and financial processes and metrics all benefit.
What type of data does Life2 analyze?
We place each unique human being at the center of a formal Person-Based Data Framework. This framework provides the fuel that powers the platform. We analyze structured and unstructured data including – but not limited to: medical history, demographics, emotional health, environment, preventative care, diet & nutrition, family history, socialization, cognitive health, medication, spiritual life, genomics, activities and habits.
How does the platform work?
We utilize client data to develop a person-based, enterprise grade, longitudinal data set. This is a highly valuable deliverable that allows for the most powerful analytics to run against it. Once deployed, new data is automatically and continuously ingested in real-time from any source or application. The dataset powers models that predict risk, cost and opportunity for every person. Predictor variables associated with each person’s risk ranking produces reasons why they are at risk. The platform automatically selects person-based, suggested actions to optimize outcomes. These actions are delivered via our Insights as a Service offering. These new insights are powered by AI and machine learning and are invaluable to improve clinical, financial & operational outcomes. The insights can be integrated directly into client workflow or viewed from a centralized client portal. Machine learning technology ensures that every action is measured for its effectiveness and is automatically “fed back” into the cycle. Over time, the dataset grows, and the platform gets smarter and smarter as more data and action results pass through.
How does Life2 manage so many data types from so many different sources?
We recognize that the organization and management of your data into a powerful longitudinal data set is the key to optimizing your outcomes and unlocking all the savings for you. We invest heavily in this area. Our platform features visualization utilities for surveying data distributions, de-dupe & data matching routines, data anomaly detection, data profiling routines, data enrichment & manipulation tools, natural language process selection, data preprocessing, free text processing and rolling window metric utilities. Our platform ingests, organizes and manages ever-growing, massive data quantities from any healthcare or insurance information system and other sources within a regulatory compliant data framework. All that investment allows new data to flow into our platform on a real-time, continuous-feed basis.
How does Life2’s technology differ from business intelligence and general analytics?
The purpose of all analytics is to examine data in the desire to learn something, then apply that knowledge towards better future results. Life2 refines and accelerates that premise to the “statistical pinnacle” with its use of technology. Outcomes are the currency of healthcare. Optimizing outcomes requires deciphering trillions of data elements in real-time while understanding the impact every action may have on a particular outcome. More importantly, it requires applying statistically proven actions at any given point in time on a per-person/per-event basis in order to shape the actual future. Life2 blends together an intricate set of interwoven technologies to optimize future outcomes and lower costs. Basic business intelligence and analytics typically provide a summarized view of what happened vs. what will happen and what actions are needed to optimize that desired outcome.
What is the high-level engagement process?
We follow a straightforward process that involves an analysis on what outcomes you want optimized, the availability of your data to achieve those goals and the output of our Insights as a Service into your workflow and our Client Portal. There is nothing for you to install and we do not replace any of your applications. We simply enhance your current workflow with our insights.
How long does the entire implementation process take?
The average time ranges from 12 to 20 weeks. The timeframe may shorten or elongate largely upon how quickly we receive the needed data.
What type of data is needed?
Our data specifications are defined to the data element level. For the payer sector, we utilize claims, consumer, pharmaceutical, wellness and case management data. For the provider (hospital) sector, the key data types are patient demographics, patient encounter file, billing file, labs, orders, vitals, medications, radiology file, provider attribution file, allergies and patient problems file. We do not require any data manipulation, modification or entry by our clients – we do all the heavy lifting.
How does Life2 secure data?
We perform all technical tasks via a HIPAA-compliant cloud environment.
How does Life2 receive data extracts?
Our project team works with you to establish the most efficient strategy to integrate with your environment, establish timelines , and assign resources. This insures that once implemented, there is no additional work required by your staff to send data to Life2. As a result, we determine connectivity and message specifications as well as setup and validate the connectivity to your data center.
What is the big picture challenge of the healthcare payer sector?
Every company around the world experiences annual increases to their healthcare spend. This happens because typical healthcare payer market applications are a cobbled-together, but essential array of disparate solutions designed to handle specific operational functions. These include claims processing, wellness, case management, telemedicine, etc. Such a siloed application infrastructure makes it nearly impossible to have all the correct information at hand that is required to make a properly informed decision. The result is the inability to effectively manage risk, cost and opportunity in concert with each other. Outcomes suffer as the final result.
How does Life2 help?
We lower healthcare costs and improve outcomes for employers and their employees. We provide technology that improves all needed services including eligibility verification, plan design & management, claims processing and billing, stop-loss management, pharmacy benefits, case management and wellness. We integrate the industry’s most advanced AI and machine learning technology into those services. This allows us to predict future claims, hospitalizations and adverse events and provide interventions to mitigate those risks, optimize outcomes and lower costs.
Who is Life2’s actual client in the payer sector?
Life2 licenses its technology to any third party administrator (TPA), benefits management firm, care management company, insurance trust, pharmacy benefits manager (PBM), insurance company, stop/loss carrier or broker interested in optimizing outcomes for their clients.
What are examples of outcomes that Life2 optimizes for the payer market?
Our platform predicts future hospitalization and claim (medical, dental, pharmaceutical) events and provides proactive, per-person early interventions (insights) to shape and optimize those future outcomes before they happen. We also predict and optimize outcomes for any diagnostic category such as – but not limited to: circulatory, respiratory, digestive, endocrine, metabolic, immunity, infectious/parasitic diseases, injury and poisoning, mental illness, neoplasms, etc.
What does the client receive via Life2’s Insights as a Service?
Our platform provides real-time information on every risk, cost and opportunity associated with each individual person. We rank the severity of the risks/costs/opportunities, the reasons for the ranking (for that particular person) as well as the interventions that have been empirically proven to optimize desired outcomes. We do this on a continuous-feed basis so actions can be applied at the need exact points in time. We feed these insights directly into our clients’ workflow applications as well as into a centralized portal for easy access anywhere at any time.
What are examples of insights?
Insights may be a clinical action such as a recommended change in medication or the need to see a specialist. They could also be behavioural (habit related) or social determinant in nature, involving risks such as diet, exercise or stress. Insights may also be financial, operational, administrative or strategic. Lifestyle-related factors including smoking, poor diet, hypertension, obesity and lack of physical activity contribute to many of the top 10 global causes of death. These same risk factors create a huge burden for the healthcare system. A significant body of research shows that about 80 percent of health outcomes are caused by factors unrelated to the medical system – people’s eating and exercise habits, their socioeconomic status, behavioural traits and where they live tend to have a greater impact on health outcomes than health care. The goal is to keep employees as healthy as possible to avoid expensive hospital visits, chronic diseases and other acute-care events.
What are the benefits for the payer client?
Optimized outcomes benefit both the employer and employee. A key benefit for the employer is lower costs. Life2 predicts future outcomes and adverse events, allowing early intervention that ultimately lowers cost. Additional saving opportunities include: reduced claims spend by provider analysis & optimization (MD & Hospital Levels), reduced claims spend by analyzing & optimizing health plan design metrics, stop-loss management and administrative services optimization.
Does Life2 provide any value to claims processing?
Yes – in the area of Claims Fraud & Abuse Detection. Life2 applies algorithms and data analysis techniques to automate claims fraud and abuse detection via “known patterns”. The results are compiled into a Billing Leakage Report (BLR) used to adjudicate claims and tag end notes. Reports are automated and integrated into client workflow.
What are the data requirements for the payer sector?
We utilize structured and unstructured data in the following – but not limited to – areas: claims, consumer, wellness, case management, pharmacy and human resources.
What types of interventions exist for an employee of a self-insured company?
Our intervention repository framework consists of major areas that include: disease management, catastrophic care management, demand management, disability management, lifestyle management, integrated care management, preventative care management.
Can Life2 directly help insurance carriers?
The Life2 Platform is perfectly suited to be the core game-changing technology for new types of insurance business models. These would place risk mitigation and analytics transparency at the core of any strategy. The first-mover insurance company in this space has the potential to rapidly win business and become dominant. Life2 leverages existing data and allows the savvy insurer to more accurately predict and manage risk, and therefore better price their policies, win more competitive bids, improve claim processing, lower costs, generate more profit and ultimately to deliver better health outcomes.
How does Life2 help hospitals and health systems?
Hospitals desire real-time “course correction” actions – or “red light / green light” action validation – indicating a patient remains “on track” during their stay. The only way to truly measure “right track / wrong track” is to have a complete picture of all known clinical, operational and financial risks – on a real-time, patient-by-patient basis and across all hospital IT systems. Life2 handles the required data analysis and calculates the appropriate “course correction” clinical and procedural actions to optimize outcomes and lower costs.
What are the high-level benefits to the hospital?
Life2 adds value to any patient admitted to the hospital. The key benefits are time to diagnosis, early detection of clinical decline, reduction of variation and improvement of key clinical drivers.
What does Life2 deliver to the hospital?
We deliver an initial set of Insights as a Service bundles:
- Operations Bundle: Length of Stay, Readmissions, Reimbursement and Discharge Disposition
- Infections Bundle: Sepsis, Pneumonia, UTI and Antimicrobial Stewardship
Each bundle delivers real-time, person-based analysis of risks, costs and opportunities and recommended actions to optimize those outcomes.
What other bundles can Life2 deliver?
Our platform can provide insights for any of the 800+ DRGs (diagnosis related groups), the 3,000+ CCs (co-morbid conditions) and the 1,500+ MCCs (major co-morbid conditions). We can also provide insights to optimize any additional clinical, operational, financial, safety or quality metrics/outcomes.
What are the associated savings for the hospital?
Our platform saved a 376-bed US hospital $10M in Year 1 by reducing over 5,400 avoidable days (days that exceeded maximum reimbursement for final coded DRG), reducing readmissions and reducing average length-of-stay. We also delivered other key areas of savings in the areas of reduced resource utilization and optimized discharge planning.
What is an example of expected clinical results?
Using infections as an example, the Life2 platform shows the hospital real-time, patient-level sepsis risk, typically hours but even days before current identification methods. Our analysis alerts care teams to real-time sepsis risk, accelerate the process of differential diagnosis development, and predict a patient’s decline earlier than the clinical team would otherwise detect it.
Can Life2 help the hospital emergency department?
Our platform can add new and exciting functionality to Emergency Department workflow. Examples include the ability to predict clinical deterioration, early detect Sepsis, Pneumonia and other clinical conditions. In addition, it can provide functionality for “operational” areas such as predicting Emergency Department length-of-stay as well as predictive likelihood of admission (as an inpatient), observation or discharge soon after the patient enters the Emergency Department.
Can Life2 help the hospital finance department?
We provide real-time payor analysis and reimbursement benchmarking. Together, these manage and optimize reimbursement. We can also predict whether a claim will be approved or denied and if denied, supply the proactive actions needed to avoid that event.
Can Life2 help the hospital administration department?
The Life2 Platform provides person-based, real-time analysis consisting of professional evaluation, service line performance optimization, diagnostic performance optimization and clinical practice variation. Together, these impact provider performance evaluation (OPPE), management evaluation (FPPE), reduction in hospital mortality, strategic areas of focus (clinical indications) and Provider performance monitoring.
Can the platform provide value to a hospital’s revenue cycle management process?
There are endless ways to apply the platform for pre-arrival services include scheduling, pre-registration, insurance verification, payer authorization confirmation, patient liability identification, and collection, as well as wayfinding and testing preparations. One example is accurately predicting – in real-time – whether a submitted claim will be approved or denied by a payer. More importantly, our platform provides appropriate interventions for every predicted “denied” claim, allowing for the claim to be fixed before it is submitted to the payer. The machine learning feedback loop allows the Life2 platform to get “smarter and smarter” for every approved and denied claim that passes through.
Does the platform provide value to post-acute facilities?
The post-acute arena is made up of facilities that provide either transitional or long-term care. The transitional services sector is made up of home health, assisted living, rehabilitation, skilled nursing, hospice, and long-term acute care hospitals. The Life2 platform provides value to hospital and post-acute facilities by managing risk leading up to discharge and continuing through admission into the post-acute facility. Data regarding outcomes, referral times, basic cost of care, and readmissions are captured by the post-acute providers and used to develop performance metrics. The exchange of data between post-acute providers and hospitals is improving. Relationships are getting tighter and economic “carrot and stick” metrics are becoming common. Life2 technology helps optimize outcomes on both sides of these important partnerships.
Can Life2 help hospitals with “insurance risk” opportunities?
In today’s Healthcare market there are a large number of “financial risks” that are completely insurable with established markets for each line of business. These include Medical Malpractice, Director’s and Officer’s Liability, Errors and Omissions, and Workers Compensation. However, these are not necessarily the risks getting the most attention from the C-Suite in major Health Systems. Senior executives are more and more focused on “operational risks” being imposed by the regulatory and structural changes in today’s world of Healthcare Reform. The risks receiving the most attention are the risk of performance penalties (readmission), risk of capitated reimbursement (length-of-stay), and risks associated with the selection of post-acute venues.
More complex risk profiles are coming at an accelerating pace. These include Chronic Care Management, Bundled Payments, ACO’s / Medicare Shared Savings Programs, and Preferred Provider Networks. By far the most complex are Value Based Purchasing Contracts, Clinically Integrated Networks and Population Health Capitation Contracts with large employers. The complexity of both care delivery and business management for these programs is well beyond most health systems today. They need new technologies to manage the increasingly complex web of managing risk, cost and opportunity intertwined with structural changes and regulated payment models.
Location
Life2, Inc.
11720 Amber Park Drive
Suite 160
Alpharetta GA 30009
Phone
678-671-2200
Fax
678-904-6544
What Are The Outcomes You Want Solved?
Life2 can optimize any clinical, operational or financial outcome. Tell us what matters to you? We will be in touch to talk about how Life2 and Claustrum AI can help your organization.