Hospitals are selling longevity now. Some of their own doctors have doubts

CHICAGO — The intake form at Lakeshore Vitality runs to 14 pages. It asks about sleep, grip strength, how many flights of stairs you can climb without stopping, and whether your parents lived past 85. On the last page, under a line for a signature, it asks for a credit card.

Lakeshore Health, a nonprofit system with seven hospitals around Chicago, opened the clinic last spring on the top floor of a medical office building it owns downtown. Membership costs $4,800 a year. The premium tier, which adds a full-body MRI, a coaching session every two weeks and a same-day line to a physician, costs $14,500. Insurance covers none of it.

Lakeshore is not alone. A Bedside review of hospital websites, press releases and job postings found at least nine nonprofit health systems that have opened cash-pay longevity or «healthspan» programs in the past two years, and three more that are hiring for them. Most are in large, wealthy metro areas. All of them use some version of the same pitch: find problems early, measure everything, and live longer.

What members get

The packages look similar from system to system. They start with a long first visit and a large blood panel, often 80 to 120 markers. Most add a body-composition scan, a fitness test and a meeting with a nutritionist. The more expensive tiers add whole-body imaging and genetic testing.

Dr. Arun Pillai, who directs Lakeshore Vitality, said the clinic exists because primary care visits are too short to talk about anything except the problem in front of the doctor. «We have 15 minutes to manage someone’s blood pressure,» he said. «Here we have 90 minutes to talk about the next 30 years.»

He said the clinic’s revenue goes back into the health system, and that Lakeshore uses some of it to fund free blood pressure screening at two community centers on the city’s South Side.

The doubts inside the building

Four physicians who work for systems with longevity programs, including two at Lakeshore, told Bedside they are uneasy about them. Most asked not to be named because they were not cleared to speak to reporters.

Their concerns are practical. Large blood panels and whole-body scans turn up findings that are probably harmless but still need to be checked. That can mean more scans, biopsies and specialist visits, which the patient’s insurance may be billed for, and which carry their own risks.

«You find a spot on the kidney that would never have hurt anyone, and now that person is on a two-year imaging schedule,» said Dr. Miriam Castellanos, a geriatrician at a Midwest academic hospital that does not run such a program. «That is not longevity. That is anxiety with a parking validation.»

There is also little evidence that this kind of broad testing helps healthy people live longer. The large studies that exist look at single screening tests in specific groups, not at a bundle of 100 markers in someone who feels fine. None of the nine programs has published outcomes data. Two told Bedside they plan to.

A question of mission

The programs raise a harder question for nonprofit hospitals, which do not pay most taxes in exchange for serving their communities. Lakeshore’s top tier costs more than the median household in two of the neighborhoods its hospitals serve spends on food in a year, according to city data.

Pillai does not dispute the comparison. «If the choice is that wealthy people buy this from a startup, or they buy it from us and part of the money goes back into the community, I know which one I would pick,» he said.

The physicians who spoke to Bedside mostly agreed on one thing. The parts of the programs most likely to help, such as exercise coaching, sleep and diet, are not new and do not need a scanner. «We could give that to everyone,» one Lakeshore internist said. «We just don’t get paid to.»