The Case for Health Assurance
We had just finished this book — well, a more innocent version of this book — when the Covid-19 crisis started steamrolling across the globe. We hit pause, knowing that Covid-19 was going to radically change the healthcare landscape.
Within a month, we could see that everything we originally wrote about is getting accelerated by Covid. We were writing about a new category of care that we thought would evolve over five or ten years. Instead, the future is rushing to us.
On the flip side, it’s become painfully obvious that if a new kind of care we call health assurance — explained in detail in this book — had been in place before Covid, the crisis might have had a different trajectory. An important driver of health assurance is data — every person’s ability to get continuous, real-time data about their health so they can keep themselves healthy and out of doctor’s offices and hospitals. That data, once in the cloud, can also be anonymized and analyzed for population health.
If tens of millions of people all over the world had been using health assurance services by January 2020, the data could’ve helped officials spot the outbreak early or see clusters developing, and take actions to minimize the impact. It could have saved the lives of heroic first responders, doctors and nurses, who would have fewer cases to treat and more advanced information about patients coming to them.
At the same time, individuals using health assurance services could’ve been confident that their health was being constantly monitored by software. The service could’ve looked for patterns in a user’s data that indicated the user had caught the virus, then provided instructions about what to do about it.
Over the next couple of years, health assurance technologies will become enormously helpful as governments try to restart economies. At this writing, experts are saying we’ll see a prolonged period of loosening and tightening restrictions on movement and gathering. Restrictions will loosen; we’ll resume a modicum of normal life; the virus will resurface; and restrictions will tighten again until the virus is contained. To pull that off well, governments will need rich, real-time data about citizens’ health. The more health assurance technologies permeate the market, the more health data we’ll have, and that can allow officials to make decisions on restrictions quickly and accurately. We are absolutely confident that health assurance can be a game-changer during this period, and may help us all get back sooner to some version of normal.
Bottom line: The pandemic strengthened our view that real change will come as tech entrepreneurs and the traditional healthcare ecosystem work together instead of against each other — a theme you will see repeated throughout this manifesto.
We start by admitting that so far, the Technorati have failed to transform health care delivery — a system still broken, confusing, expensive, inequitable and based on charging fees for sick care, not keeping people well.
What we’ve all learned is that dangerous viruses like Covid-19 will happen again, and our only choice is to innovate our way to a society that can get ahead of outbreaks and manage them. Otherwise, we will continue to lose lives and devastate the global economy every time one of these viruses emerges.
This book is our attempt to spark that innovation and inspire health professionals, entrepreneurs, policymakers and other leaders to take action.
Hemant Taneja
Stephen Klasko
Kevin Maney
Spring 2020
