Kaiser Permanente’s CEO George Halvorson called for a celebration this month for the successes of a program launched decades ago they call Archimedes. It is a computerized artificial intelligence system that creates models of the human body and then projects the probable impact of care and treatment approaches. Archimedes has been used to do a couple of clinical trials and ended up with results that matched the actual clinical trials done on live patients. They routinely use it to improve care. And it works.

One of their primo researchers, David Eddy, M.D., just did a large scale test of Archimedes relative to the prevention of heart attacks and strokes. One of the scenarios that the researchers ran through Archimedes looked at what might happen when a mixture of prescriptions that science has suggested are helpful in CAD was combined to prevent heart attacks and strokes. (The drugs considered were aspirin, Lisinopril, and a statin). There was no tool to do that study. So they used Archimedes and ran a computer experiment with their own patient database.

Archimedes predicted that a "bundled" prescription of heart protective medications would reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke for the Kaiser Permanente high-risk populations by 71 percent. They missed by a bit. Over the course of three years, the three drug program actually prevented 1,271 heart attacks and strokes. That reduced the occurrence of heart attacks and strokes for the covered population by 60 percent instead of the 71 percent projected by the system.

300 media outlets have picked up this story. The world now knows that the simple combination of medications in KP's Aspirin-Lisinopril-Lovastatin (A-L-L) initiative -- this will have a potentially greater impact on emerging nations that can’t afford interventions I suspect. It’s very interesting stuff. And, they’re spreading the option to participate across their entire population, and 250,000 have signed up to try it with disease management and/or early risk factors.

It’s impressive -- they’re using predictive modeling, targeted member outreach, and computer-supported care to get real results. Hats off to KP and Archimedes.

*** Image info: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gi/ / CC BY-SA 2.

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