Healthy by design
How can we unlock the potential of putting personal health insight into the hands of everyone?
Patients are ultimately the experts in their health. They know more about themselves than any clinician can ever know. They are experts in the nuances of how they feel, respond and adapt. Yet, it’s also true that very few truly understand the truth behind their health, how to focus their efforts, and what actions have impact. There are big gaps in the connection between things. People may catalog symptoms, consult with Dr google, ask friends, and try to make sense of their experience on their own, but often make little progress in understanding, let alone making change.
When not hunting for answers, or testing out unproven recommendations, it’s also possible to completely ignore what’s happening and avoid the truth when it’s inconvenient or bad. Suddenly it’s no longer fun to track everything on Myfitnesspal on a day when there’s cake to be eaten. Added to that, the broader health and wellness industry often overlooks the fact that health, framed as something that “should” be a priority, is not appealing to most. It’s not something everyone is clamoring to become engaged in. Especially when nothing is visibly wrong. It can feel very similar to saving money, reducing energy waste, or recycling. It’s for the greater long term good. The proposition for investing in health needs to be about something much deeper, more compelling, and personal. It needs to truly fulfill on a promise of feeling better, being better, easing suffering and healing. When nearly 100% of health is managed and determined by the patient, getting this part right is fairly important to improving outcomes.
3 questions for the future.
How can we build people’s health capability by giving them a deeper understanding of themselves, their patterns, needs and potential?
Where’s the “Mint” for health? When Mint was introduced, it helped change people’s relationship to finance by pulling together data from across all of their various accounts, and reflecting back their financial picture in an incredibly accessible way. Imagine a simple interface like this for seeing an insightful overview of health. I don’t mean just a dashboard with all the data compiled into pretty charts and graphs. I’m thinking of offering up a new understanding of the connections between things — the ability to see patterns, progress and history — linking the deeply personal with targeted insight. This could mean translating things like lab values and genetic data into human language, spotlighting patterns of everyday behaviors to show impact, offering recommendations relevant to lifestyle, history and profile. No one needs more data, it’s a matter of being able to see a dramatically simplified, accessible, and relevant picture of health today, and over time, to inform how they act. Leading to a deeper insight into themselves.
I also don’t mean leaving the burden on the individual to chase down records, and manually log every detail, but identifying ways to capture without requiring excessive reporting. Fueled by data that integrates conversations with clinicians, online searches, daily behaviors, activity, nutrition, alongside genomic and vital values, a new kind of sophisticated picture can begin to form. If this could not only be easy to capture and offer relevant insight, but also the ability for others to plug into, it could act as a universal platform for a kind of personal health data bank. Perhaps it would open up the potential for us to google ourselves, linking the unique and individual with data across the many. Could this make the human system, and the understanding of it, more accessible to all of us? Similar to how PC’s revolutionized computing, this could boost everyone’s capability to more effectively invest in their own health, and arm them with a new capability for self management and optimization.
Several organizations are beginning to pioneer this new sophisticated personal health profile. Gliimpse gathers up people’s records for them, Flow Health wants to be the one source for all health data, Umotif offers a comprehensive view of health across multiple factors, and Qualia Health integrates physical, mental, and social health, comparing individual with population data. These organizations are not only connecting multiple fragmented pieces of data into a comprehensive picture, but beginning to link data to use it as fuel for preventative action, advanced diagnostics, and tailored health information.
How can we create a system to support targeted action toward positive prevention and/or achievement?
Imagine a personal health impact plan that linked goals, targeted action and impact. Positive health outcomes can often mean changing a behavior, or several. An impact plan could be a path to managing, preventing or treating a condition. It’s a broader shift from prescribing pills to a truly comprehensive therapy and action plan to shift from one health state to another. By setting goals, tracking progress, connecting with peers and having a coach, many programs have been proven to prevent disease, manage conditions and optimize performance. Digital therapeutics are well on the way of creating platforms that facilitate this kind of support, yet they are often limited to one condition or area of change (eg. preventing diabetes or sleeping better). A more systemic approach could be applied across multiple conditions, as well as to support efforts to optimize or maximize health, not just prevent or manage conditions. Starting with framing goals, seeing progress and ultimately building future habits, investing in personal health impact can and should be much more than a pill, or one off experiment. It’s a continuous set of goals and challenges. New services are helping in reinforcing motivation and nudging new actions, treating change as an ongoing and shifting commitment. Way Better creates games that help give people that extra nudge in taking on a health goal, and they apply it to multiple kinds of changes. Lifesum is similarly supporting advancing across a broad collection of health goals.
How can we integrate health into people’s daily lives?
Blending into people’s lives means health that doesn’t feel like “health” at all. Health needs to feel positive, and act as a means of enhancing not just fixing. Nike has played an important role in advancing the health of many by promoting activity. They don’t sell “health” but they certainly play a role in influencing it across many people. There is much to be learned from consumer organizations that come from a place very different than the health industry, which is traditionally steeped in business to business transactions. Achieving health should both be a public service, and something people want to consume and invest in for themselves. In fact, many already are. People spend billions of dollars on health and wellness far outside of the domain of the traditional health industry. Health has the potential to feel fun, positive and light, even when it’s not. In fact, bringing joy and creativity into the darkest moments can be healing. Solving this isn’t just another app. While Apple is setting the ground work to both inspire new and better apps, they are also preparing to play a new role in health. Tying together Care Kit, Health Kit, and Research Kit — will hopefully bring consumers/patients, health providers, and researchers together around health impact. When these interactions become not only functional, but intuitive, positive and engaging, the health landscape could look quite different. Technology should be fuel for behavior, conversation, and amplifying what’s natural to people.
Can we thoughtfully design interactions to enhance everyone’s capability for living well?
Health needs this simple interface layer, comprised of foundational building blocks for creating health, not just completing coded interventions. Care delivery and everyday wellbeing need to become more interwoven. It needs not just a series of apps and point solutions, but an integrated view. The true “hub” of health should really be with the patient, where ever they happen to be. There’s no reason there shouldn’t be a holistic platform for personal health, complimented by a new kind of care plan that supports comprehensive therapy for a person not a condition, and health engagement that is positive, easy and woven into daily life. Patients of course should be the masters of this data, and allow others to plug into it, while health impact plan(s) might serve as a universal organizing principle for delivering value to them, helping them achieve health outcomes and providing a new set of insight across the population around what really works.
