Movement entrepreneurs are digitally savvy outsiders who create new sources of power by aggregating and mobilizing the voices of many.
Tips:
Use institutional power but don’t become institutionalised – small groups of passionate people are lean and nimble and have autonomy are more powerful than those in power.
Build a movement, not a cult of personality – less susceptible to cock ups.
A movement is not an internet meme – build for the long term.
Contemporary health systems, and the health R&D systems that inform their behaviour, are failing to address the major threat of chronic disease because they are bound to legacy business models that depend on process over outcome.
These characteristics are leading to increasing health care costs in the absence of improving population health outcomes.
In frustration, Governments around the world are indicating that there is no more new money, with health systems being asked to operate within their current (and in some cases, diminishing) means.
SOLUTION
In response, the accepted business model for health care is slowly changing from a fee-for-service regime, to a value-based approach where providers are paid to improve health outcomes.
Similarly, the business model for medical research is changing, from a publish-or-perish, incremental-impirical regime, to a value-based approach where research is recognised ultimately for its clinical outcomes impact.
These changes will take time to occur is Australia, but are already well underway in the US, the UK and China.
To preserve their sustainability and viability, modern health systems will need to become sentient, focusing on prevention of harm from the contemporary modern food systems.
While health systems will always need to attend to illness as and when it presents, they will need to fund these activities out of savings made by avoiding preventable illness.
To achieve this, future health systems, and the R&D systems that inform them will be sentient, and feature the application of behavioural economics, real-time analytics, and predictive analytics to deliver low-unit-cost automated behavioural interventions.
OPPORTUNITY
The great Canadian ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky is often quoted as saying “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”
As a respected, successful and self-described entrepreneurial research institute, the George Institute is uniquely placed in Australia, but also internationally, to lead, and ultimately profit from these seismic disruptions in health system operations and performance.
There is an opportunity for the George Institute to establish a scalable, for-profit wellness generating clinic (working title: George Wellness) that, as a baseline, applies the latest understanding of wellness and prevention to a recruited population, but then uses continuous/frequent monitoring and real time analysis to develop a proprietary, preventive learning algorithm that delivers wellness to, while protecting this population from various harms in a powerful and demonstrable way.