Health happens daily, but healthcare is missing a key piece…
What is healthcare missing?….giving out “A+” grades. Let me explain.
Most health companies inevitably have a diagram explaining their strategy that consists of a Patient at the center with a circular landscape of icons surrounding them, representing the care team and all the players involved focused on this mythical patient figure. If you don’t have one of these be sure to get one if you want to put VCs or Physicians to sleep during a presentation.
We are Patient Focused
Is the slogan of all. Wrong! You’re not and you can’t be in the current architecture. This strategy is surely failing because of a lack of foundation to execute. You cannot be patient focused if you only see them a few times a year at best, remember, health happens daily. You cannot manage longitudinal well-being if you have no channel or feedback loop when patients leave the clinic.
“Yes we know, that is why we need Engagement! We have to treat patients like Consumers.”
Ah the next buzz words to surely draw more ZZZZs. The reality is when people are patients they are not acting like rational consumers. A patient is acting in a survival mode, simply wanting to get better and trying to navigate the cumbersome path to receive their healing, with no thought of cost, brand, or value. This is why a lot of consumer technology companies also have a hard time making an impact on healthcare.
So if we aren’t working with “consumers”, and a “patient” is a temporary state of acute care, what are we dealing with to improve health and take a preventative, value wise approach?
Perhaps our strategy should be to simply work with “People.” Well people are actually group-think, herd animals, and so heterogeneous no specific approach could work. Averages and population health tactics lose the human element of who someone actually is.
Ok, ok, so we are dealing with a “Person”, a real individual. Yay! I can use the last buzzword in my repertoire, Personalized Medicine, precision health! I can learn all about this persons life, their social determents of health, their BMI and zip code. Hook them up with monitors and stream it into our data lakes. We can get blood tests, hair samples, and family histories. Then finally sequence there RNA and DNA genomes to understand their genetic blueprint and gut bacteria. Wow that is a lot of great data! There is still one problem….
A human person is not very good at understanding this multi-dimensional, complex correlation of data, and physicians have trouble themselves even when aided by computer algorithms. Perhaps the motivated few can be coached into being cognizant and caring, despite the lack of education, incentives or social pressure, but…
What we really need is a “Citizen”. What’s the difference of a Citizen vs a Person you ask? Well a citizen has rights and responsibilities to themselves and something greater, an entity that unites other citizens into a community, a culture, a country, and a belief. We need a system that gives people a voice, physicians power to do whats right, and aligned incentives built in, with bureaucracy out of the way.
Healthcare today is great at giving out “C”, “D”, or “F” health grades. We recognize symptoms, provide diagnoses, and administer procedures and medicines to “fix” sick patients. Lets get this specific issue from an F back to a C. Anyone ever given you a “B-” on your overall health and offered a plan to get you up to an A, proactively…before anything was hurting? You know your IQ, but what about your “HQ”. We educate and test ourselves on the core arts and sciences, have SAT scores, GPAs, and evolution through tiered grades of sophistication. This information builds up and follows us around on transcripts and resumes. We completely lack this structure when it comes to healthcare. There is no manual, no test to pass, no scores to show.
We must provide a mechanism to quantify health, a very ambitious goal today. Valiant efforts are in action to achieve this, like Verily’s Baseline. Once we have a connected system, a health scoring algorithm, and motivators for citizens to be healthy, then we simply need a means of transferring value to let the natural health economy start flowing. This will lead to health through wealth and the reciprocal nature of that will actually lead to wealth through health for our nation.
This is why I’m so excited about Citizen Health, a stealth startup launching a platform owned by people and physicians, with measurements and aligned incentives built in. They are using the next generation of blockchain technology, Ethereum, to start a cryptoeconomic instrument called “Medit” to support a direct peer to peer health system.
This will bring back the nostalgic sense of physician home visits and direct primary care to an entire community while empowering them with new access to data and technology that gets out of the way and lets healthcare happen daily. We cannot remain jaded by the past, stuck in the mud, lost in a complex puzzle of contradicting goals and regulations.
My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure. — Abraham Lincoln
We owe it to ourselves and most importantly to our children. We must give them better healthcare than we have, the next generation does not deserve the dysfunctional system that exists today, and by the way they wont put up with it either. The next generation will have an efficient health system that works for them, that they own.
Join the revolution, you can start with some small baby steps to get yourself to an “A+” health score. Go signup for Citizen Health’s token sale today and then do 50 pushups tomorrow, the rest will take care of itself. If you don’t believe me and want to be inspired about the power of small tasks, go watch this navy seal admiral talk about making your bed in the morning.
