Healthcare is Sick (and the Cure is not a Prescription)

Do you ever go through a week or month of feeling off? You’re low on energy, unusually stressed, having trouble sleeping, or experiencing other unfamiliar, uncomfortable symptoms? Booking an appointment with your primary care doctor for ambiguous symptoms has proven in the past to be a useless hassle. After you finally get in to see the busy provider, a common experience looks like this:

• You’re asked a mound of questions because they don’t have access to your comprehensive medical records and lifestyle history. They rely on you to be your own historian versed in basic medical knowledge.
• You receive a physical evaluation.

This results in one of three outcomes:

1. You’re told to rest and drink fluids.
2. You’re given a handout for a generic diagnosis based on your symptoms. You are prescribed medication and sent on your way.
3. You’re referred to another provider and location for further evaluation and tests that they don’t have in-house.

Nobody has time for that anymore. The ROI on all that effort for seemingly minor symptoms doesn’t incentivize you. So, instead, you may start a new juice cleanse, shift to a superfood diet, implement an intense exercise plan, or introduce a supplement routine–all diagnosed by the circus of people that play Doctor on the Internet and media. Alternatively, and perhaps this is worse, people are simply ignoring minor symptoms until they go away or exacerbate. This is a problem. This is the death of preventative care.

Hormone imbalances, nutrition deficits, and bad lifestyle habits can be the silent killers that begin as feeling off and fester to result in chronic diseases or long-term health problems like heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, or cancer. Yet people aren’t catching these problems at their source and altering their habits and lifestyles because 1. Primary care is inconvenient or 2. Your doctor isn’t addressing preventative care.

I’m proposing a concept that solves these problems, a primary care experience that focuses on what matters–your vitality, today and tomorrow. Because looking at the primary care structure today, that’s sadly not what I see. Before I walk you through this concept, let’s dig into where we’ve gone wrong.

PROBLEM

There are two things wrong with traditional primary care:

1. Approach
2. Method

APPROACH: Prescriptive

We are retroactively treating symptoms to target disease rather than combatting the harmful habits that cause them. And this is not solely the fault of providers. Most patients aren’t paying attention to their personal care until after they’re sick. Our only chance at living a healthy lifestyle is choosing to self-educate because we’re taught to see a provider only once we’re already sick. Who’s telling us what to do before then to prevent it? If you’re smart enough to do the research on your own, you’re one of the few people taking responsible reins of your vitality. But many don’t take that initiative and instead spend their days indulging in sweets, fast food, and sedentary lifestyles. These deleterious ways of living explain the growing rate of chronic disease.

According to the Center for Disease Control, as of 2012, about half of all adults — 117 million people — had one or more chronic health conditions.

It’s no secret that this is a massive problem, the mystifying part is the fact that very little is being done. The number of people with chronic illness has been increasing every year since 1995, and that trend is projected to continue to reach a whopping 49.2% of Americans by 2030. The most effective way to halt a trend in society is to look at the cause. Preventative health should be a readily available, ubiquitously accepted resource that educates individuals on healthy habits customized to their unique anatomy and genetics.

METHOD: Archaic

Today, we can own a self-driving car, place a digital Ikea sofa in our living room, or fly a drone over Yosemite, yet many medical providers are still relying on paper medical records to care for their patients. According to a study done by the American Medical Association, doctors are spending 49% of their working hours on record keeping and desk work, allowing just 29% to dedicated patient interaction. While much of this record keeping has been technologized with EMR, the improvement in productivity is not powerful enough. Most of today’s EMR technologies are clunky, complicated, and marginally better solutions to an archaic system.

Ideally, digitizing record keeping should free up nearly all of a doctor’s valuable time to spend with patients. But that’s not what’s happening — not yet.

Technology is beautifully innovating every industry, rapidly transforming our lives by making things simpler, more seamless, more connected. It’s done a great job of getting things out of the way, allowing us to thrive as individuals and focus on our crafts. The beauty of technology is the more that it is added, the simpler and less complicated our lives are made. Many mundane, repetitive tasks that we previously had to inefficiently do ourselves, have been replaced with behind the scenes algorithms, convenient apps, and intelligent machines. A few industries lag behind this wave of automated convenience. Healthcare is one of those, yet it’s arguably the most important service required in our lives.

SOLUTION

Functional medicine coupled with modern technology is the solution to this backward, prescriptive approach and archaic method.

My idea for a better future of healthcare leverages these two things. One that takes a holistic view of your health. One that aligns with the direction technology has instilled in nearly every other industry–connectedness, efficiency, and simplicity. One that makes sense.

What is Functional Medicine?

Functional medicine is a new approach to healthcare that is slowly but surely catching on to the masses with the help of experts like Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Mehmet Oz, and Dr. Andrew Weil. These experts advocate for its crucial role in revolutionizing healthcare, advancing human longevity, and reversing the rapid growth of chronic diseases.

Each human being is a unique animal with a set of systems constantly exerting millions of functions that yield how we look, feel, and act (e.g. digestive, lymphatic, cardiovascular, endocrine, etc.). That set of systems have a synergistic method of working together to keep us healthy and combat diseases.

Healthy is not the absence of disease, it’s a state of harmony amongst your body’s systems.

Functional medicine treats patients in a customized, comprehensive way to support that unique and complex makeup of our bodies. This is done by analyzing the interactions among lifestyle, environmental, and genetic factors and their effect on each of our bodies’ systems–a systems-oriented approach. Traditional medicine, contrastingly, teaches medical providers to treat the isolated symptoms — a disease-centered approach. The traditional approach results in prescribing predetermined, generic treatment plans (consisting primarily of prescription medicine) for a certain set of symptoms and sending the patient on their way, often without advising on lifestyle adjustments that may prevent similar issues in the future. This causes underlying problems to worsen, potentially leading to chronic diseases or expedited aging.

One of the reasons functional medicine is not a universally accepted form of primary care is because of its inefficient and complicated nature. It takes a lot of time to get a 360-degree view of a patient and treat them holistically. And a doctor’s time is expensive. The model of functional medicine is a therapeutic, engaged, and ongoing relationship between the patient and the provider. Currently, that’s the only way to understand the patient from all angles in order to treat them with this systems-oriented approach that can combat existing and future disease. But like most other analytical, systematic tasks, this is a perfect case for disruption using technology.

The Future of Healthcare

1. My Approach: Preventative
2. My Method: Technological

Enter Nimble Health–a new concept for primary care offering a comprehensive app that houses and manages your medical records and treatment plans, conveniently located offices, accessible hours, a community of specialists who work together to implement seamless care, and wellness programs to support preventative health. All bolstered with Artificial Intelligence.

You pay a flat fee monthly or annually at the similar price of a luxury gym, allowing unlimited access to an office near you. The providers are primarily on-call staff, of all different specialties. They are utilized if the AI struggles with a patient or concludes a diagnosis that needs further attention. The technology analyzes the patient’s previous medical records, lifestyle habits, current complaints, and the visit’s test results (imaging, blood work, body scan, etc.) in order to derive custom treatment plans and lifestyle guides. And all of this can be reviewed and managed within the Nimble app, allowing coherent communication and transparency across the patient’s network of specialists to ensure effective 360-degree care.

Nimble’s walk-in CHIA (Comprehensive Health Interpretation Appointment)

• You enter an office near you
• If you are already a member–you login with facial recognition and answer a set of questions on a tablet (sleep/exercise/eating habits, complaints or current symptoms, medications and/or vitamins, recent travel)
• If you are not yet a member–you work with the concierge to pool your medical records from your previous providers, insurance companies. You complete a lifestyle survey and receive the basic set of physical evaluations and tests.
• Based on what you entered and your previous history, a day plan is constructed.
• You are guided by the concierge to the tests that are able to be conducted sans medical personnel.
• Medical providers are recruited via video conference or in person if needed.
• Your test results are directly entered into your private account through Nimble, you and your specialist(s) are able to review them at any time.
• Nimble’s AI takes in all of your inputs, from your medical history and background to today’s survey and test results. These are compared against thousands of other similar patients. The custom treatment plan that is predicted to yield the most successful outcome for you is constructed.
• This proceeding treatment plan includes lifestyle instructions like nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress management, and mindfulness. It will provide directions for any medications prescribed and future office visit scheduling.
• Prescription medication may be accessed from a dispenser immediately before leaving.
• All details of the visit including test results, diagnoses, prescription directions, and the proceeding treatment plan may be accessed from your Nimble app.

A lot of this may sound idealistic and experts could poke holes in the feasibility of it from many directions. The sensitivity of personal health data…access to specialists…weaknesses in AI diagnosing…insurance involvement…high costs…etc etc etc. But it’s difficult to deny that some version of this healthcare concept must be a part of our future if we hope to advance human longevity and reverse the plague of chronic illnesses.

We Can Do Better

Today, we only see a doctor once we’re already sick. We aren’t conscious of our daily habits’ effects on our long-term health. We’re ignoring minor symptoms because primary care is inconvenient and inefficient. We see specialists to address different biosystems in our bodies — biosystems that all work together to support our health, yet the specialists that address them don’t interact with one another. We have limited access to our medical records, which also are disconnected by specialty. All of these flaws are cases for disruption. Traditional medicine is sick–and, for our sake, it’s vital that we treat it.

Let’s Get Started

There is so much ripe opportunity for innovation in healthcare. Our health is our lives. Let’s start prioritizing it.

I’m Kori, a health/wellness and biotech addict, product thinker, entrepreneur, and questioner of all things conventional. I’d love to hear your thoughts, message me on www.koriharrison.com or irokharrison@gmail.com.