Solidarity HealthShare and Co-Founder Chris Faddis joins The BS Show to talk about the rapidly advancing AI technology in the medical field and how it could change the landscape forever. Read the transcript below or listen to the interview.

Bob Sansevere (00:00):

We are joined by Christopher Faddis, Co-founder and President of the nonprofit healthcare sharing ministry, Solidarity HealthShare, which is an ethical, affordable alternative to traditional health insurance and is faithful to the moral teachings of the Catholic Church. Chris, those of us in the world outside of medicine, call it artificial intelligence, but in the medical world, they have their own name for it. It’s called augmented intelligence. Why? That’s my first question. I mean, it’s basically the same thing. They’re using artificial intelligence to help advance medical, well, medical things for doctors and for patients. And the AI use, whether you want to call it artificial or augmented, increased from 38% in 2023 to 66%, and that’s physicians reporting they use some type of an AI tool in their practice. Where’s Solidarity on this? I mean, I would think that Solidarity doesn’t have an issue with anything that could help people.

Chris Faddis (01:03):

Yeah, I mean, I think there’s certainly a reason to make sure we’re using AI to the additive benefit of patients and doctors. Again, with all of these technologies, everything promises to make life easier on someone, whether it’s a doctor or the patient, or give the doctor more time with the patient, spending less time, making notes, all that kind of stuff. And I don’t know, this whole augmented versus artificial, I think at the end of the day, maybe they’re trying to make the case that, Hey, we want to be clear that this is not replacing the doctor. You’re use this to assist the medical team, that kind of thing, which is important. I think we’ve seen a lot of these issues where people are literally using AI to think for themselves, and we definitely don’t want a medical doctor doing that. We want them to be doing that themselves.

(01:50):

Now, of course, there’s ways, I think you and I have talked about, there’s ways to use AI to fast track data research and finding correlations between things and data points and all that. Those are all good. I’ve seen some interesting ai, I mean, I think a lot of people, most people who do work in a corporate job, if you ever have Zoom meetings or online meetings, there’s all kinds of assistive tools now for taking meeting notes and assigning tasks and all of that out of a meeting using AI. And those are great, and I know there’s a lot of those kinds of programs for doctors for helping them with chart notes and things. The problem is where you come in is again, with quality. I mean, are we really capturing everything? I mean, you left me a voicemail and it said, Bob Spencer left me a voicemail. You’re not Bob Sansevere, right? I mean, there’s still a quality issue with AI where it’s not, AI is not fully picking everything up or whatever. So you do have to be really careful because the last thing you’d want is those chart notes come in and the doctor doesn’t look at ’em, and it’s diagnosing something that the next doctor sees the chart note and thinks, oh, wait a minute. Well, you’ve got this other issue. That’s the problem.

Bob Sansevere (03:00):

Here’s what gives me pause with AI in medicine or anything. There was a case, and it was within the last few months where two attorneys had to pay fees because they did several briefs using AI ,and the briefs were wrong because their culling information from, I guess Google or from every source out there. And if the sources are wrong, that’s not a good thing. It’s also laziness on their part. I hate to think the doctor’s going to be lazy, but that said, in essence isn’t like an MRI, I mean, this is the next step in medicine because MRI, those things, I don’t know if that would be considered AI but without them, when they came in, what a huge advancement that was for finding issues with people. It just, maybe it’s the next thing, but it’s how they apply it. And for lack of a better term, they have to be careful not to get silly with it. And overly-

Chris Faddis (03:56):

Yes, I think so. I think you could apply it in how you serve people. You can apply it in how you do menial tasks and things, but you do have to be very careful that you’re still reading the notes. You’re still treating the patient, right, not the notes. Those kinds of things. It’s interesting you mentioned MRI. I think there’s a new CAT scan that I heard about, and Dr. Oertle who we work with, who, well, and your listeners know, has used with some of his patients where they actually take a, I think it’s a 3D CT scan of the heart, and they’re able to then take AI and correlate the actual plaquing and use this tool to see how bad are your arteries, right?

Bob Sansevere (04:39):

Really?

Chris Faddis (04:39):

How thick is it? How hard is it? All these kinds of things. And in fact, in that scenario, one of the first patients they put through it, they found that that person was, I mean, was basically about to die, had so many blockages, and they were able to intervene, and I think he had a five bypass because of it, and essentially saved his life. So there are great uses of ai if we use them appropriately and we apply them to the right technology, that’s going to advance CT scans and MRIs even further where we don’t need the next technology. We just need to apply AI logic to it. So lots of good things, but also lots of things, like you said, where people are essentially allowing AI to think for them. That is absolutely not what it’s about. And while I don’t know if augmented intelligence is the right term, I do think we should probably stop saying artificial intelligence. It’s not artificial. It’s database.

Bob Sansevere (05:30):

So no.

Chris Faddis (05:32):

Yeah,

Bob Sansevere (05:32):

Oh-

Chris Faddis (05:33):

Machine learning is what it’s,

Bob Sansevere (05:33):

It’s interesting to say that because there was a time when the internet was the information highway in the beginning, and I have to tell you a funny story about that. My wife was Mrs. Minnesota America back in 1992. One of the contestants onstage, because they have an onstage thing for the top 10, was asked what she thought of the information highway. She described a road that, well, it’s great when you’re driving and you see all this information, I guess where to turn off how many miles to the nearest filling station or gas filling station. You hear that much anymore either, but gas station. But yeah, we’ve come a long way from-

Chris Faddis (06:18):

You’ve come a long way,

Bob Sansevere (06:20):

But we’re going, it evolves.

Chris Faddis (06:23):

It evolves and it’ll end up, I think it’ll end up in a good place. I just think, again, we’ve got to be very smart and cautious and careful, and I hope that that’s what we’ll end up doing. I think there’s enough smart people out there. Again, we talked about this before where a lot of insurers got in big trouble because they were using AI to deny pre-notification at a large clip and causing a lot of problems for patients. So that’s not what we want to use AI for. We want to use it for assistive things that will help serve the patient or practice medicine, help the doctors have as much information as possible at their fingertips to make good calls.

Bob Sansevere (07:03):

Well, and I hope President Trump signed an executive order to basically use AI in the fight against childhood cancers to help diagnose and treat childhood cancers and help identify new cures. And I think 50 million has gone toward this. That’s not a bad thing. If it can do something, we don’t know what it can do yet, but the fact that it’s a possibility it could do something. I say I’m all for it to see if it does work.

Chris Faddis (07:31):

I think if we actually try it and we actually work and pay attention and make sure it actually has good outcomes, I think a lot of times federal government spends that money and we get very little for the dollar.

Bob Sansevere (07:40):

Yeah

Chris Faddis (07:41):

But, if you put it to the right things and you really study and work with it, I think there’s a ton of opportunity, again, especially with research, with identifying rare cancers, with identifying treatments that work, and then with all the genetic precision medicine you can do, tie in genetic therapies and all kinds of things. So it’s a lot of good promise, and then a lot of things we have to watch out for.

Bob Sansevere (08:02):

And if it doesn’t, then it just goes to the dogs. You can probably hear the dog barking in the background.

Chris Faddis (08:07):

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Bob Sansevere (08:09):

I’d like to get-

Chris Faddis (08:10):

Maybe the dog wants some AI.

Bob Sansevere (08:11):

Well, I need some augmented intelligence for the dog to know when to be quiet. That would be a nice thing. All right. I want to talk to you about Solidarity HealthShare solidarityhealthshare.org. It’s a great alternative to traditional healthcare, and it also is a much less expensive, in many cases, well, in most cases, where it’s not going to cost people as much out of pocket. And how many, I know I’ve asked you this before, but give people a little bit of background. How many years it’s been now? It’s over 10 years now, right?

Chris Faddis (08:43):

Yeah. Well, we’re going on 10 years actually. So we’re in our nine, almost 10 years. In fact, you mentioned the cost. I’ll tell you, we’ve served, I think, what over so far, close to 50,000 members, not all at one time. They come and go obviously, but we’ve also shared into, we were just looking at this yesterday, and this is, of course, the gross bill charges, the bills that come in. Then we deal with them and reprice them, but nearly 500 million worth of medical bills as a fairly small organization. Wow. I think that’s pretty exciting. That’s very exciting. We’ve been able to save 65%, 64% on that over the time. So it’s been amazing to see that happen. And one thing that’s really exciting, Bob, we just launched and you mentioned affordability, two new programs yesterday we just launched for members. One is for young adults, 18 to 29.

(09:35):

It’s called Solidarity Savvy. It’s a low cost kind of low entry point, no bells and whistles except for some telehealth and an option to add a generics only prescription card. Really simple and easy for young adults that they have something, but also, isn’t going to break the budget. Most of them don’t want to do it at all. So when you’re trying to convince your young adult to get some sort of healthcare, this’ll help. And then we also launched a catastrophic program called Solidarity Shield for those who just really need a low cost option with zero bells and whistles without all the wellness and all that. So those two programs visit our website to learn more. We’re pretty excited about those. We think it’s going to help a lot of folks, especially as the insurance prices just continue to skyrocket.

Bob Sansevere (10:16): Oh yeah. And that is solidarityhealthshare.org. Chris, Co-Founder and President, thanks so much, Chris. Take a quick break. The BS Show’ll be right back.