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Meet Propeller Health: Digital Health’s Poster Child for Invalid Savings Reporting

We’ve seen shorter abstracts, and we’ve seen abstracts with more curious findings, but we’ve never seen a shorter abstract with more curious findings than this one, done by Dignity Health and Dr. Rajan Merchant, and financed by the California Healthcare Foundation, evaluating a gadget made by Propeller Health.

The study group’s use of inpatient care for asthma declined by a whopping 62% vs. the control group.  You might think this result violates Dr. John Ioannidis’ well-known conclusion that large treatment effects are usually wrong, but you’d be mistaken.  You see, there was no treatment here.

There was only an effect.  Dr. Ioannidis’ result applies only to actual comparisons of effects due to different treatments, not to random changes in effects using the same treatment.  In this study, the actual treatment protocol was the same and the inhalers were the same.

The only thing different was frequency of drug use.  Whereas the conventional wisdom for disease management states that hospitalizations can be avoided by more adherence and hence more drug use, in this case the study group used less medication than the control group, reaching for their rescue inhalers 25% less– once every 6.3 days vs. every 4.7 days for the control group.

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