My Healthcare 💡 Moment.

Inspiration for this 💡 moment came from two sources - Haleem Mohammed MD MBA and his post on July 4 (link) about the high levels of burnout in healthcare, and also from the WSJ (sorry behind a paywall) and its article titled: Why the Walmart Model Doesn’t Work in Healthcare. (link).

Summarizing a long story short - the current US healthcare system is one of misaligned incentives which continues to 'rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic' in support of profit.

As I was reading the article and shaking my head I stopped at this precise point - the doctor needs to be a conduit for capturing value elsewhere. All I could think of is how does the current overburdened US healthcare worker take on even more responsibility to find value.

Why can't someone else find value for them?

And then I had the 💡 moment.

20 years ago, John Hagel invented a new word - Infomediary. Here is the definition in his words (source).

It was a new word that we made up, short for “information intermediary.” The notion was that we as customers will increasingly need a trusted third party or personal agent to act on our behalf to help us get more value from data about ourselves. Among other services, the infomediary would act as custodian of our personal data and negotiate with various third parties to provide limited access to the data in return for significant value received.

We know that our data is incredibly valuable - Google and Meta have multi-trillion-dollar market caps based on that data.

I thought (💡) - why couldn't we give the US Healthcare workers access to that data? A quick Google search indicates that there are approximately 10M healthcare workers in the US, and we have about 304 million insured individuals.

What if we created a LLC that was owned by the US Healthcare worker. An annual subscription costs $100 each. That funds it with $1 billion each year. Next, we build a new kind of healthcare app - one that can be reprogrammed in real time to adapt to each patient's needs, values, and preferences in the moment. One moment they can be a patient, and the other moment they can be a consumer. When they are a patient, all data is subject to HIPAA and flows across to the conventional channels. When they are a consumer, all data is governed by the appropriate privacy regulations and flows through the trusted infomediary to a new ecosystem.

McKinsey have called this the Ecosystem Economy. They're projecting it to be approximately $70 trillion by 2030. Essentially it is a collaborative ecosystem of vendors who offer a selection of products, content, and services that interest the consumer. The infomediary handles the value exchange and collects a transaction fee. As more healthcare workers join the LLC, they ask their patients to download the app, this drives viral adoption. As more patients join, it attracts more collaborative vendors. This is Google's business model applied to the US Healthcare worker.

With one huge exception. The US healthcare worker is now in control. We haven't changed the existing system, nor should we, it is too entrenched. All we've done is to connect what exists and can be monetized, in an entirely new way. In doing so, value is returned to the patient/healthcare worker relationship.

What do we need to make this happen?

1. An app that can be reprogrammed to adapt to individual variability in real-time.
2. A web standard protocol that connects everything up
3. New data privacy sharing controls.

This is what it looks like.

When I'm a patient the data flows along the red dotted lines. When I'm a consumer the data flows along the green dotted lines. Healthcare workers/patients/consumers meet in the middle to extract and exchange the value of their data.

How valuable is the LLC in the middle?

As a multiple of revenues, substantial. As a multiple of earnings, substantial. Probably in the trillions of dollars.

And the beneficiaries are the people who need it the most - the US Healthcare worker and their patients. And yes, the same model can scale globally.

The app, the protocol and the data sharing choices are all available now. And as I learned from Haleem Mohammed MD MBA and the WSJ, there is no shortage of overburdened healthcare workers looking for something new.

All the remains to be seen is — how willing are they to consider something new that creates more time, offers better outcomes and is financially lucrative?

Gary A. Stewart Eva Minkoff Glenna Crooks, Ph.D. Robert Sundelius, FACHE Gary W. Druckenmiller, Jr. Prasanga Lokuge Carter Williams Chris Geisler Atif Zafar