Ceresti Health, a leader in virtual care for patients with conditions requiring intensive family caregiver support, particularly Alzheimer’s, has been recognized for its innovative approach. The Validation Institute has validated Ceresti’s digital caregiver empowerment program, demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing total medical costs. This validation underscores the program’s success in enhancing caregiver capabilities and patient outcomes.
Key Takeaways from Ceresti Health’s Validation
- Innovative caregiver support: Ceresti Health focuses on empowering family caregivers with tools and knowledge, which significantly enhances the care provided to patients with chronic conditions. The Validation Institute confirmed that this approach effectively reduces hospitalizations and overall medical costs.
- Tailored technology use: Ceresti provides caregivers with specially designed tablets that do not require prior technology experience, making it accessible to older adults. This technology enables personalized education and effective remote monitoring.
- Detection and prevention: The program trains caregivers to detect early signs of health deterioration, preventing severe complications and potential hospitalizations. Early detection is critical for managing chronic conditions, particularly in elderly patients.
- Validation Institute’s role: Validation by the Validation Institute lends credibility to Ceresti Health, distinguishing it from competitors and affirming the efficacy of its caregiver empowerment program. This third-party validation is essential for building trust with healthcare providers and patients.
Introduction
Validation Institute:
I’m joined today by the co-founder and CEO of Ceresti Health, Dirk Sungsen. Hello Dirk and welcome.
Dirk Sungsen:
Hi, it’s nice to be here.
Validation Institute’s Impact on Ceresti Health’s Caregiver Program
Validation Institute:
It’s great to have you here. For our audience, Ceresti Health is the leader in virtual care for patients with conditions that require high levels of family caregiver support, focusing quite a bit on Alzheimer’s and other dementias.
I’m glad to be speaking to you this morning, Dirk, because along with many others who may be listening to this, I am personally impacted by this, having a mother with Alzheimer’s. Validation Institute recently audited and validated Ceresti’s digital caregiver empowerment program for its ability to lower total medical costs over similar patients when their family caregiver enrolled in your program. So I was hoping that you could tell me more about Ceresti and that program.
Dirk Sungsen:
Yeah, absolutely. We’re very pleased that Validation Institute did this work for us. What Ceresti essentially does is we take a family caregiver, think of a spouse, an adult child of a Medicare Advantage member, and we enroll that person in a program.
We are essentially activating the caregiver, which means we’re increasing that caregiver’s knowledge, skills, and confidence, which makes them best able to provide care for a loved one.
We’ve sent a tablet to that caregiver, some of the caregivers could be spouses 80 years old, so we send a tablet that doesn’t require the ability to use a smartphone.
On that tablet, we have personalized education, we match the caregiver with a social worker coach, and we ask the caregiver to participate in a form of remote monitoring.
What we’ve seen in this program is that once the caregiver starts to understand how to better care for a loved one, it has the benefit of keeping their loved one out of the hospital and reducing overall medical spend.
Validation Institute:
That’s amazing. And what makes that approach so unique to Ceresti?
Dirk Sungsen:
When you think about caregiving approaches, a lot of companies focused in the caregiving space are focused primarily on the caregiver.
You have companies who say I’m improving, let’s say, the productivity of an employee who’s also a caregiver, or I’m reducing their stress and burden.
That’s their primary value proposition. We’re kind of unique in that we are getting paid for the outcomes for the care recipient but we’re activating the caregiver.
And then we say look at the great outcomes for the care recipient, which is a member who’s typically frail and elderly, many times will have dementia, stroke, or Parkinson’s.
That’s one aspect of it. The second aspect is we’re tuning our program in such a way that the caregiver can learn to detect changes in their loved one’s condition which is kind of the precursor for preventing a hospitalization.
A simple example is if there’s a change in the frequency of urination in the member, right? Something could be going on.
I think we’ve all heard stories about how important it is to catch a urinary tract infection before it becomes septic or somebody gets dizzy and falls and breaks their hip, and so forth.
So by tuning it for outcomes for the care recipient, our program is quite different than we believe all other approaches are to caregiving which are focused primarily on the caregiver.
Unique Aspects of Ceresti Health’s Caregiver Empowerment Approach
Validation Institute:
Oh, it’s amazing. It’s great that you’re focused on both aspects of that caregiving which I haven’t heard a lot of companies doing. Can I ask what made you seek out validation with the Validation Institute?
Dirk Sungsen:
Well, as we all know, particularly in Medicare Advantage where you have lots of actuaries in the companies, the whole thing is about credibility.
I mean when I think about a typical health plan or risk-taking provider, there’s a lot of noise of people saying hey I can do X, Y, and Z, and then if you’re on the other side, you’re like how do I know if this is real or not? So we just, you know, we’re building a whole company everything we do around credibility, and having third-party independent third parties kind of looking over our shoulder and saying look we agree with the approach you’ve taken, we’ve validated the results, that’s super important to us. It’s almost table stakes if you want to be successful in the market that we’ve selected.
Ceresti Health’s Clinical Study Design and Impact
Validation Institute:
That’s great, and credibility as you know is very important to us, and making sure people understand how you approached your study. Can you talk a little bit about the design of the clinical study to prove your cost savings?
Dirk Sungsen:
Yeah, so when you think about it, because we are looking at outcomes for the care recipient by actually supporting the caregiver, it’s a little to say how would you do a study.
So we did it, we use claims data, right? So we received all the claims data from the health plan and we sort of looked six months prior to when people started the program, we sort of get everybody matched up in terms of you know same age, or the same sex, the same geographic location, the same cost.
We did a propensity matching to make sure that we had 160 people in the program, we had 400 people in the comparison group.
Those were matched up and then you know as you go along you track outcomes in the program group and you use a difference of differences approach to make sure that you are addressing some of the regression to the mean objections that most people should and would have.
So we’re kind of addressing that by taking a difference of differences approach, and it gives you an ability to now attribute statistical significance to the results.
So in our case, we actually found that over six months we reduced inpatient admissions by 80 percent and medical costs by 53 percent and you can see that without, I mean the first reaction is this can’t possibly be true but when you recognize that a caregiver can detect a change in condition which is the most important thing to prevent a hospitalization, you sort of realize that caregivers have a superpower.
Their superpower is to observe their loved one for a change in condition if they take action tremendous benefit can attribute to the care recipient who stays out of the hospital and to the caregiver whose burden is lower because their loved one doesn’t decline.
Ceresti Health’s Validation and Market Differentiation
Validation Institute:
That’s just awesome. Just out of curiosity, how does this validation differentiate you from the competition?
Dirk Sungsen:
You know, nobody wants to say they have no competition but at least today, we are the first and only company in Medicare that has a study like this.
So I think where we are looking for differentiation is when we approach a chief medical officer in a Health Plan who’s understandably skeptical, the competition is like doing nothing right, they don’t know what we can do, and then to first order, they don’t believe what we can do.
So bringing them, you know, a study that has been independently validated puts us into the realm of okay, this feels like it could work.
So for us, it’s really the credibility and almost competing against doing nothing. I think over time other companies will come into the space and we’ll certainly, you know, if they don’t have a validated study right, that’ll obviously be something we point out but at the moment it’s the credibility of the results and the competition of doing nothing that we’re overcoming by bringing them you know the validated results that we have.
Validation Institute:
It’s great. Well, Dirk, thank you for taking the time to meet with me today and congratulations on building an amazing company and solution that truly is making a difference.
I encourage all of you to learn more about Ceresti by downloading the free validation report at validationinstitute.com. Again, thank you Dirk and have a great day.
Dirk Sungsen:
Appreciate it, thank you. Take care, bye.
