Health Ahead: Sequential Comparative-Effectiveness Studies Toward Automated, Universally Deployable Preventive Health Screening
William Brandenburg, MD
Summary
The Health Ahead Comparative Effectiveness Study is a pragmatic, parallel-arm interventional platform that systematically compares successive changes to preventive health screening - each isolated as a single variable against current practice - on the path toward a fully automated screening system deployable in any environment, including the most isolated and resource-limited communities. Each comparison is evaluated with a common set of engagement, behavior-change, experience, cost, and longitudinal outcome measures, allowing results to accumulate on a consistent yardstick across the life of the platform. The first comparison evaluates static versus interactive personalized health report delivery. Subsequent pre-planned comparisons, added by protocol amendment, evaluate mobile community versus fixed laboratory screening; and a hybrid medical-droid plus human-delivery model versus human-only screening. All participants are simultaneously enrolled in the 100-Year Human Aging Study and the Human Observatory Study, contributing individual longitudinal and population-level causal inference data through those protocols.
Description
Access to comprehensive preventive health screening is profoundly unequal. Geographic, economic, and systemic barriers leave medically underserved populations - including rural, frontier, and isolated communities - with little or no access to the depth of preventive screening that identifies disease before symptoms occur. The long-term aim of this work is a fully automated preventive screening system that can be deployed anywhere people live. Reaching that aim safely and credibly requires testing each change to the screening model one variable at a time, against current practice. The Health A…