Category Archives: file note

complex adaptive systems, cool, data saving lives, entrepreneurship, file note, healthcare, healthy habits, musings, nutrition, policy, politics, rapid learning health systems

Prevention Economics

Right. So I’m now comfortable with the idea that the greatest failing of modern healthcare is for it to have extended lifespan without having extended healthy life years. The challenge then, is to extend fully productive life to something far closer to our life expectancy. This can be done with a plant based diet, fasting and moderate exercise. No pills. No fads. Jus a new norm.

But how do we pay for it? Determine the economic cost of extending a life’s productivity by a year seems like a reasonable first step. Then take a piece of that?

Bring in the direct beneficiaries of such a change – the life insurers, super funds and broccoli farmers.

What a great bunch of business partners they’d be.

Giddy up….

complex adaptive systems, cool, data saving lives, entrepreneurship, file note, healthcare, healthy habits, meaning, musings, nutrition, policy, politics, quantified self, rapid learning health systems, research methodology

Healthways…

http://www.healthways.com  || http://www.healthways.com.au

Christian Sellars from MSD put on a terrific dinner in Crows Nest, inviting a group of interesting people to come meet with his team, with no agenda:

  • Dr Paul Nicolarakis, former advisor to the Health Minister
  • Dr Linda Swan, CEO Healthways
  • Ian Corless, Business Development & Program Manager, Wentwest
  • Dr Kevin Cheng, Project Lead Diabetes Care Project
  • Dr Stephen Barnett, GP & University of Wollongong
  •  Warren Brooks, Customer Centricity Lead
  • Brendan Price, Pricing Manager
  • Wayne Sparks, I.T. Director
  • Greg Lyubomirsky, Director, New Commercial Initiatives
  • Christian Sellars, Director, Access 

MSD are doing interesting things in health. In Christian’s words, they are trying to uncouple their future from pills.

After some chair swapping, I managed to sit across from Linda Swan from Healthways. It was terrific. She’s a Stephen Leeder disciple, spent time at MSD, would have been an actuary if she didn’t do medicine, and has been on a search that sounds similar to mine.

Healthways do data-driven, full-body, full-community wellness.

They’re getting $100M multi-years contracts from PHIs.

Amazingly, they’ve incorporated social determinants of health into their framework.

And even more amazingly, they’ve been given Iowa to make healthier.

They terraform communities – the whole lot.

Linda believes their most powerful intervention is a 20min evidence-based phone questionnaire administered to patients on returning home, similar to what Shane Solomon was rolling out at the HKHA. But they also supplant junk food sponsorship of sport and lobby for improvements to footpaths etc.

Just terrific. We’re catching up for coffee in January.

entrepreneurship, file note, healthcare, healthy habits, policy, rapid learning health systems, research methodology, technology

Healthy life years is the key selling proposition for funding NCD interventions…

Non-communicable disease presents an as-yet, unresolved health research challenge. But they may also lie at the heart of a similarly unresolved intergenerational, macroeconomic challenge.

To date, governments and academics around the world have sat back and carefully observed the epidemic of overweight, obesity, metabolic syndrome and diabetes overtake their communities.

The food industry has aggressively defended its turf, understandably resisting any calls for regulation in the absence of definitive evidence that these interventions will work.

Only the most courageous of politicians would ever embark on the regulation of such a powerful sector in the absence of evidence supporting efforts such as restricting advertising to children, mandating processed food composition, food labeling and taxing macronutrients know to be harmful.

So we find ourselves at an impasse that no one seems particularly able to break.

An emerging theme related to this issue is the idea that while the health system has succeeded in delivering extended life, it has not yet extended healthy life years. As such, the population still shudders at the thought of raising the retirement age past 70, even though average life expectancy now surpasses 80.

Non-communicable disease is considered a major driver of this divergence. As such, preventing non-communicable disease may represent an important challenge, not only driven by a health/moral imperative, but also for important economic reasons.

There are significant macroeconomic consequences of people not living most of their lives in a productive state of health. Most significant of these is the capacity of societies to sustain pensions when boomer-driven demographic shifts result in an increasing ratio of pensioners to tax payers.

This places life insurers, governments and superannuation funds into the medium- to long-term frame as key beneficiaries of addressing non-communicable disease.

This in turn makes them key targets for attracting investment capital to a venture addressing this concern.

Imagine a world where people lived healthy, vital, productive lives well into the 70s.

Too much?

Google have spotted this opportunity by investing $100Ms in a new start up called the California Life Company (CaLiCo). Its initial focus is on “ageing” with an early emphasis on genomics, epigenetics and a pharmaceutical fix.

I starting to think the answer is much simpler: Eat food, not too much, mainly plants. Move.

It’s about less, not more.

Establishing the evidence for this inkling, and then commercialising the insights gained is the inspiration behind Riot Health.

Stand by.