Caris Cares

The American Healthcare System is broken!  Payors are put in a position to force their policy holders (patients) to access the cheapest healthcare provider possible and to deny care entirely whenever they can get away with it.  But it’s not their fault.  It is the system that we, the American citizens, have put them in.  They are, for the most part, for-profit companies with a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits.  Once they have set their premium for the insured the only way that they can make money is to keep what they call their “medical loss ratio” below their premium income.  So their only incentive is to steer you, the patient, to the cheapest possible healthcare provider.  Which flies in the face of what we all want, which is the highest quality care that we can possibly get for what ails us.

So now that puts the health care provider in a pickle!  Because the insurance companies won’t pay them unless they discount their services; regardless of the quality of care provided.  Further, they are paid for procedures performed on you, based on a system known as Current Procedural Terminology, or what they call CPT’s. Not based in any part on the quality of care or the outcome for the patient.  Again this is not their fault!  It is the system that we have put them in.  So they have to perform as many procedures as they can on their patients, at again steeply discounted prices, in order to get paid for them so they can pay their bills and the salaries of those people that work for them, including a large staff of administrative and billing people, in order to force the insurance companies to pay them.  Again, remember that these insurance companies don’t want to pay and they certainly don’t want to pay in a timely fashion.

What a horrible system that we have set up in this country!  Especially when one realizes that higher quality care actually saves the most money!  Think about it.  If you can diagnose someone accurately the first time and then get them on the right treatment, then they will get well faster and stay out of the system.  Meaning fewer doctor visits and fewer hospital visits because they are getting well.  This is a long-held perspective of mine which I call “Health Improvement.”  It is something that I feel very passionate about and have decided to devote the rest of my life to.

It is not an easy task.  The insurance companies are large and powerful.  The system has great momentum.  We here at Caris Life Sciences want to focus on quality first and have pulled together some of the world’s best doctors and scientists to be able to provide the best care that could possibly be offered to our patients.  We have attracted some of the top doctors that previously held professorships at the world’s leading institutions such as Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Cleveland Clinic, Mayo, University of Michigan, and UT Southwestern to name a few. There is no way that this could ever be accomplished in a not-for-profit setting.  Not with all the bureaucracies that exist in large siloed academic institutions.  We are a private company with a majority owner that is committed to long-term investment in bringing better quality care through better diagnostics for patients. Although we ultimately are a “for-profit” company, we have a vastly different agenda than other for-profit companies with accountability to a different ownership structure.  This creates a very unique situation that I do not believe has ever occurred before.

This is one of the reasons that we keep saying that we are a completely different kind of company because we have a completely different agenda!  Go ahead; take a look at our list of doctors and scientists.  Look at their backgrounds and training. Look at our molecular profiling that we do for cancer patients. We don’t know of anyone else in the world that offers anything like it.  Look at the research the Caris Research Institute publishes every year. All funded entirely by us with no outside money or grants of any kind.  Moreover, we have spent years now researching and developing a new platform technology that will revolutionize medicine.  We call it our Carisome technology.

It will create the opportunity to diagnose health conditions with precision from a simple blood test.  I focused on this because I believe that precise diagnoses will lead to much better care for the patient and also avoid costly, unnecessary procedures.  As an example, our first test that we will launch later this year is for prostate cancer.  The existing test today for prostate cancer is called the PSA test and it is not a very accurate test.  Proven by the fact that 70% of all prostate biopsies done in men with elevated PSA’s are not cancerous.  This is very costly to the system, but even worse many men become incontinent and impotent for at least some period of time following the biopsy, and some men even die from it. To quote Dr. Steve Gutman, the former head of the department at the FDA that approved the PSA test, “If you look at PSA which we approved for screening in 93, 94 or something like that; it’s now fourteen, fifteen years later we don’t even know if it saves lives or just makes people impotent and incontinent.” It is easy to see that if we had a blood test that could tell you with 95% accuracy that you don’t have cancer, then you don’t need the biopsy.  Thereby avoiding a very costly and invasive procedure.

Thanks to President Obama we now have a chance for the first time to begin crafting a new system built around you, the patient!  You must let your voices be heard by your doctors: Do not let them stop referring your samples to us just because the payors want them to refer your case to a cheaper option, which will often be a generalist who is not specialty-trained to read the area of concern.  And please tell your doctor to not set up his or her own lab to self-refer to a generalist and not specialists like we have here at Caris.  We provide specialty-trained or board certified pathologists and scientists to review and provide an expert opinion on every case sent to us. For every difficult biopsy we receive each day, there will be a grand-rounds session with over 20 experts evaluating and discussing it together to get to the absolute correct diagnosis. For this level of quality, we must hire the top doctors and scientists available; therefore we can’t afford to receive the bottom-rung reimbursement levels that many payors want us to accept. And by the way, this is short-sightedness on their behalf because with better diagnoses first we will help the patients get well faster, and ultimately take costs out of the system saving them money.

We will never compromise on our principle to deliver the highest quality care possible no matter what the cost!  We are now and forever committed to you the patient and believe that this is the only way to effectively change the system.  We are taking one step and one patient at a time because Caris Cares, and you are the only ones that can change this crazy system.  You only have the one life!  Let’s fight together and save as many lives as we can and relieve the most suffering possible!

Caris Cares!