Health is not merely the absence of sickness. To be healthy as a human is much more than not being sick, now or in the future. Being healthy is feeling powerful in your body. It is being energetic and hopeful about your aspirations in the face of external circumstances. It is being surrounded by people and relationships that provide love, meaning, and a forward momentum to your life.
Too often, we have treated the body and ignored the human.
A health system that is relationship-first: Your relationship with your care teams is the foundation of your health. It’s not just about convenience, it is about trust, respect, and compassion that sustains over a lifetime. Beyond the professional care team, your health is a function of the relationships surrounding you in your personal and work life. Your family and friends are the care teams that have a greater influence on your behaviors impacting health. What if a health system were embedded seamlessly in your life to help you optimize your relationships with all care teams?
A health system that helps you achieve your goals: Health is an input to fulfilling your aspirations. It is not about just keeping you disease-free. It is about keeping you both disease-free and successfully engaged in meeting your goals - financial, personal, family, or career goals. What if a health system were to align its conversations and interventions with the life goals you want to achieve?
A health system that is proactive: The medical-industrial complex is fine-tuned to diagnosing and treating acute illnesses. And yet it is chronic illnesses with long developmental pathways - metabolic dysfunctions, cardiovascular diseases, cancers, and neurodegenerative diseases -that account for the majority of deaths in our modern society. The key to successfully addressing chronic conditions is assessing their risk early and deploying risk-dependent, evidence-based medical and lifestyle interventions. Unlike other health systems focused on acute interventions, what if a health system were to specialize in early risk mitigation and proactive chronic disease management?
A health system that is unremarkable: Anyone who interacts with the current health systems in the US has a story to tell about the remarkable effort it takes to get even simple things done. From doctor’s appointments, to labs, to bills… everything makes us stop what we are doing to try to fit into the processes that are clearly not designed for the consumer. What if a health system were unremarkable in that it is just there for us when we need it, and doesn’t make us jump through any hoops?
Creating such a health system requires us to reframe how we think about getting care.
The traditional frame of healthcare is one of discontinuous exception handling. The patient reaches out to a provider when something is wrong. They get available care, and once that episode is over, there is no further engagement. Till the next care episode, when something comes up again for the patient. There is no conception of health outside of exception handling now or for the future. Because of this frame, healthcare settings specialize in exception handling and are sharply distinct from the settings patients routinely inhabit - their home, work, or play spaces - where the majority of health is actually experienced.
Creating the new health system we envision requires moving to a frame of continuous enablement. In this frame, the patient is a consumer who is continuously interacting with the health system in all the places they inhabit. These interactions are less about exception handling and more about supporting, inspiring, and moving people to be healthy in all the dimensions of their lives - relational, physical, behavioral, and financial. And if and when there is an exception, the patient is guided effortlessly to the highest quality medical intervention for their situation.
We envision this continuous enablement health system to be achieved through a synergy of top-tier health professionals and technology that amplifies their expertise while personalizing it and making it continuously available to each user.
The inflection point that makes this possible is generative AI. For the first time in human history, patterns of believing, thinking, and doing embedded in the way we communicate can be harnessed for improving our health. However, AI by itself is not sufficient. It is the human-AI relationship that powers the continuous enablement health system.
The human-AI relationship is still in its infancy. The focus of most research and development has been on LLMs and AI agents doing complex tasks that they are instructed to perform. However, not much work has gone into developing AI presence systems that support humans in their believing, thinking, and doing, all the while moving them to higher and higher levels of health and performance.
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