The Future of Healthcare is Health Care

Imagine if you had to ask your bank permission to look at your account. What if the law said you should reject the request if the customer has positive balance?

Sounds crazy right? Welcome to healthcare.

Healthcare is a broken, legacy institution.

The experience is terrible. The incentives messed up. And the only party that seems to benefit from this system is big pharma.

The future of healthcare will look nothing like this in 2030.

I used to believe that the future would just be more of the same, with more tech sprinkled everywhere to make the current system more efficient. With the advance of AI and cloud infrastructure, we can centralize all the data and knowledge, to design better treatments, more accurate diagnoses, and faster research.

But I now understand that it’s going to take a paradigm shift. We have way too little control over our own health. Ownership is going to be at the center of this new paradigm.

Our health is objectively getting better, but our expectations are increasing just as fast, if not faster. We demand more than functioning bodies. We want to thrive. The current system is not adapted for the new standards. It’s not even able to cope with the basic medical needs.

If we look at history, centralized systems tend to evolve in a decentralized one. A few decades back, technologists ridiculed the concept of a personal computer. 20 years later and a billion of people own a smartphone.

Today, healthcare does feel like a luxury. And to think that even wealthy people have a long distance relationship with their health is crazy.

We often hear that people don’t want to know how their health is going — they don’t want to hear the bad news they say. They think looking at your health is a reminder of your death.

But your health is like your bank account. Just like we lack basic financial litteracy, we misunderstand our health. You don’t wait 6 months to look at your bank account, do you? Is your bank account a proxy for poverty?

The reason health is a source of stress for many is because we don’t feel in control. The way to mitigate that stress is to learn how to read the data, and understand the actions we can take to change the metrics.

The closest version of that today is bio-hacking. Measuring all kinds of metrics using wearables like Levels GCM, and Oura ring. They are expensive devices and it may sound crazy to spend hundreds of dollars on them every month. But again, it used to be the same with laptops and smartphones. Now that we understand how valuable a laptop is, it makes sense. A laptop pays for itself. And in a near future, we’ll have enough litteracy and data to understand that bio-hacking pays for itself too.