PROBLEM

• 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.