Iryss Uses Predictive Analytics to Help Patients Manage the High Cost of Chronic Illness

By providing financial insights to “save before, pay now” for chronic illness sufferers, Iryss® hopes to eliminate the financial stress currently facing 133 million Americans.

Challenge

When someone is diagnosed with a chronic illness or disease, they often go through three stages of understanding. First is purely physical as the patient seeks to find out why they aren’t feeling well. The second phase is the emotional toll brought on by the diagnosis and what it now means to deal with a long-term, sometimes life-threatening ailment. The third stage hits a few months later, after the patient has been presented with this new normal. That’s when the first bill for the diagnosis arrives and with it the financial reality of this journey.

The cost of long-term treatment, diagnostic services, and overall health management for people with chronic illness and disease is five times that of “preventative care” each year, and there are 133 million people dealing with life-changing ailments throughout the US. General medical bills are hard enough to bear, and are a leading cause of bankruptcy in America, but disease management is much worse. Forty percent of cancer sufferers alone file for bankruptcy within four years of their initial diagnosis.

To date, planning for these kinds of crisis events has been nearly impossible. Financial planners don’t typically take health needs into consideration — or even how to consider them — when setting up retirement or savings plans for their clients. That’s in part because until recently, medical information was inaccessible and hard to analyze.

How can patients suffering from a chronic disease avoid going bankrupt so they can thrive mentally, physically, and financially? What resources are out there to help average people — who don’t have large amounts of disposable cash on hand for emergencies — be more financially prepared for long-term healthcare? What can be done to alleviate the economic burden in order for families to turn their focus to what matters most: the emotional and physical care and support of their stricken loved one?

Iryss has answers.

Origin Story

In 2008, buy-side healthcare equity analyst Jeff McCormack was sitting in his living room, holding his one-month-old son, when he felt numbness in his left leg. The master swimmer and triathlete was taken aback when it got bad enough that he couldn’t stand up. He saw his doctor and the diagnosis shocked him: multiple sclerosis. Suddenly, his whole world changed. He was first hit physically, then had to deal with the emotional strain. But, two months later, he received his first medical bill. He was stunned.

Jeff was a professional at the top of his career, familiar with both the medical and financial sectors, and yet nothing prepared him for the exorbitant costs associated with managing his chronic illness. While he was fortunate enough to be able to pay the bills, he couldn’t help but think: What about people who couldn’t? What would he do, he wondered, if he were in the position to have to literally choose between feeding his family or getting his treatment? How would he handle that?

The research began and Jeff discovered some nasty truths in the chronic illness world. Medical issues are two-thirds of all bankruptcies in the US, making them the number one reason to file. The chronically ill spend five times more per year than healthy individuals — approximately $6,000. Healthcare is the number three line item for budgeting for the chronically ill but number 10 for healthy individuals. (For the chronically ill, first is lodging, then food, and then medical bills.) CNBC reports that 40% of people diagnosed with cancer are bankrupt within four years of diagnosis. In general, $500 billion of healthcare spending was on the shoulders of consumers last year (2022), growing at 9% per year and will be $800 billion in five years.

Jeff was astounded by these facts and wanted to find a way to help others not drown in debt simply because they were managing a chronic illness. First, he went to work for two AI companies to learn technology and how to scale businesses. Then he saw an opportunity to help others by using his financial expertise and became a financial advisor.

Jeff’s business grew and he was helping 75 families manage their finances, but it wasn’t scalable and making the impact he envisioned. So he made a leap of faith. His kids were now old enough that he wanted them to see their father doing something that made a difference in people’s lives, something he recalled watching his own dad pursue when he was their age.

He combined what he learned with the AI companies and his experience in healthcare and finance to build something new. The vision was to create a virtual platform focused specifically on providing the tools and resources needed for chronically ill patients and their families to find financial relief through successful medical cost management.

Iryss was born during 2022, and Jeff and his team began the long road to building a program to support financial wellness for the chronically ill.

Under the Hood

Iryss is a SaaS platform available to chronically ill patients and their families. It’s split into two main components: a payment intelligence solution and a data-based future healthcare cost estimator.

The first component analyzes bills and identifies opportunities to help chronically ill patients reduce them. Resources are provided to support lowering healthcare costs, including financial assistance programs and information on where to find more affordable diagnostic services, such as less expensive MRIs or blood draws, and pharmaceutical discounts and co-pays — all of which are options many chronically ill patients are unaware are available to them. Additionally, Iryss reviews the patient’s capacity to pay and recommends a payment strategy that’s in the patient’s financial best-interest.

The second component helps chronically ill patients plan for future healthcare costs utilizing data analytics. Iryss comes at this from a modeling perspective on a disease-specific basis. The platform takes the user’s medical data, pairs it with their financial information, and identifies which patients are at risk of not being able to pay their bill and will require assistance in managing the cost of their disease journey. This makes it possible for Iryss to work with users and their families to begin saving in preparation for what is to come. He calls it “save before, pay now” and it’s designed to alleviate undue stress during an already difficult situation.

Per the Iryss website, chronically ill patients get started in three quick steps:

1. Link all medical accounts using the company’s integrated Plaid portal. Plaid provides APIs to make it easy for users to connect their banking and financial information to an app.
2. Iryss then reviews the patient’s diagnosis and transaction history to identify any potential cost savings that may be available to them. This is where the payment intelligence solution plays a critical role.
3. The patient then applies for the savings options, which allow the Iryss team to assist with finding the most cost-efficient services available for their specific medical need — now and in the future — reflecting the second component of future healthcare savings support.

By amassing disparate parts from different systems — health and financial — Iryss is making the experience easy for consumers to follow and helping alleviate the economic stress of chronically ill patients and their families so they can focus on what is more important: their physical and emotional wellbeing as they navigate their disease journey.

Why We’re Proud to Invest

On average, those dealing with life-long ailments have six to eight healthcare transactions per year. This includes diagnostics, physician visits, treatments, and even picking up the pieces when a therapy fails and the patient has to start everything all over again. Bearing the weight of whether or not it’s possible to afford the costs associated with managing a chronic diagnosis in addition to that of the physical and emotional pain that comes with them is taking an unbelievable toll on patients and their families.

And that toll isn’t levied equitably across society but hits hardest that part of the population that can bear it least. We’re proud to back Iryss because they’re focused on bringing relief to the segment of the population that needs it most, those who can barely afford a $250 preventative medical bill let alone one in the thousands of dollars during their chronic disease journey. Iryss’ next step is to work with Medicaid recipients to ensure no one needs to choose between feeding their family or getting their medical treatment. Crippling healthcare costs and the disconnect between who can afford quality care and who cannot is a consistent problem, and the company’s devotion to presenting a solution to this unsupported population builds on StartUp Health’s Health Equity Moonshot.

We’re proud of the passion and commitment Iryss shows in alleviating the economic worry from those suffering from chronic illness, so patients can focus on their physical and emotional health. The resources the company provides have the ability to help patients who had once been forgotten thrive and build a new future.

Join us in welcoming Iryss into the StartUp Health family.

→ Learn more and connect with the Iryss team.

Passionate about breaking down health barriers? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our Health Equity Moonshot.

Funders: Learn how you can become a Health Moonshot Champion and invest in Health Transformers.

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Iryss Uses Predictive Analytics to Help Patients Manage the High Cost of Chronic Illness was originally published in StartUp Health on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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