DENVER & BRENTWOOD, Tenn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Eon and LifePoint Health today announced they have entered into a five-year agreement to develop the “Healthy Person Program.” The new program pairs evidence-based follow-up with a first-of-its kind approach to identifying and tracking patients with incidentally found abnormal findings. It will allow for earlier diagnosis and treatment of potentially catastrophic diseases.
“We are delighted to team up with Eon to develop the Healthy Person Program,” said Bart Daugherty, AVP Clinical Technology, LifePoint Health. “We began working with Eon three years ago on a project to enhance earlier detection and diagnosis of lung cancer. The success of this initiative led us to explore new ways we could collaborate. The Healthy Person Program will help us to proactively identify more health risks in our patients and advance our efforts to make communities healthier.”
This new collaboration between Eon and LifePoint extends a partnership that began in 2018 when LifePoint began using Eon technology and services to improve screening for lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer deaths in the U.S. The “Healthy Lung Program” leverages Eon’s Essential Patient Management (EPM) platform to identify and track patients at risk for lung cancer. LifePoint piloted this program in three of its communities to explore its effectiveness, eventually expanding it to all 88 of its hospital campuses across the nation.
In addition to lung cancer screening for an eligible high-risk patient population, the Healthy Lung Program identifies incidental abnormal lung findings on X-ray, CT scans, and MRI reports that may be ordered for patients for clinical reasons other than the concern of potential lung cancer. If an abnormality is found, Eon EPM tracks the patient until they either clear the program and no longer need to be followed, or their findings change and they need further diagnostic intervention. This has resulted in earlier stage diagnosis of lung cancer, which can significantly increase the treatability of the disease—and patients’ chances of survival.
“In clinical practice, I quickly realized that my ability to affect change was limited to the patients I served. I started Eon to change the paradigm in healthcare to one that optimizes patient care on a macro level, first domestically and then globally,” said Eon Founder and Co-CEO Dr. Aki Alzubaidi. “Partnering with LifePoint has been a great accomplishment because of the impact we have nationally. Expanding to additional disease cohorts will only increase that impact.”
Eon is the market leader for early detection of lung cancer and recently launched similar applications to identify and track additional disease states, including thyroid, pancreas, and aortic aneurysms among others. Using Computational Linguistics, a discipline of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Eon extracts abnormal findings and clinically relevant information from radiology reports and automates redundant and burdensome tasks for low-risk patients, while triaging high-risk patients for provider review. The result is more patients being captured within the system and longitudinally tracked per evidence-based guidelines.
The Healthy Person Program is based on leading clinical practices and is designed to ensure timely notification of findings to providers and patients, improve patient follow up regarding findings, and ultimately lead to earlier detection of several diseases in the communities LifePoint serves. Eon and LifePoint anticipate rolling out the program in 2021 first by expanding to the identification of aortic aneurysms, and then by expanding to programs focused on detection and disease management of thyroid, pancreatic and breast cancers.
About Eon
Eon is a Denver-based healthtech company with a mission to make patients healthier and healthcare affordable by revolutionizing the way healthcare data is gathered, curated, and shared among industry professionals. Eon is leading the industry with its Essential Patient Management (EPM) platform for lung cancer screening, incidental pulmonary nodule identification, other solid organ cancers, and incidental aneurysmal findings. The company is on a mission to ensure the right data reaches the right people at the right time to identify disease early and stop it in its tracks.
About LifePoint Health
LifePoint Health is a leading healthcare company dedicated to Making Communities Healthier®. Through its subsidiaries, it provides quality inpatient, outpatient and post-acute services close to home. LifePoint owns and operates community hospitals, regional health systems, physician practices, outpatient centers and post-acute facilities across the country. More information about the company can be found at www.LifePointHealth.net.