By MATTHEW HOLT

In some interesting news this week, Inland Empire Health plan (IEHP), a major Medicaid health insurer in southern California with about 1.2 million members, and its contractor Preveon Health announced that they were “extending a pilot” with Surveyor Health, for their MedRiskMaps product.

This is interesting for a bunch of reasons. First it’s a good example of how technology is now being applied to help with the almost absurd complexity of modern medicine–complexity that technology has both added to and may yet cure. Secondly, Surveyor Health has been building its technology for several years and (FD) I’ve been advising them off and on since 2009 and know the principals well. Thirdly, and this is mostly for grins, it represents some of the absurd language used to describe our crazy health care system.

What does the tech do? Surveyor Health’s technology is very complex optimization technology that examines the incredible number of symptoms and interactions undergone by patients taking multiple medications. As you know most chronically ill patients are on upwards of half a dozen medications and some are on many more. The more medications, the more the potential for serious and sometimes fatal drug-drug interactions, side effects and more. You only have to think of the litany of celebrity drug deaths (Michael Jackson, Prince, Anna Nicole Smith, Health Ledger, Tom Petty, to name a few) to understand the seriousness of the issue. Erick von Schweber, a real theoretical physicist and CEO of Surveyor Health tells me that when you get above 11 drugs the calculations involved are more complex than what Google has to do to index the web. (And yes, he now is allowing me to call it AI!)