Humane Economics & The #CovidSpring Ep 4 - From Patients to Occupants: Turning the Health Service on Its Head

Frontier Tech Radio

In this episode we will be talking to another big-thinker: Andy Wilkins, founder of Vision4Health about the future of health and health services post Covid.

Working with leaders in the field his vision is of a revitalised service that, turned on its head, wraps itself around us as people (rather than patients) rather than, as now, the other way around.

That becomes a part of our day to day environment rather than something we visit when unwell – and can detect the warning signs before that happens.

The convergence of machine learning and AI, genomics, big data analytics and the internet of things are creating a new context enabling personalised medicine - as a service.

Andy's research is looking forward 10 to 15 years and using systems thinking to create a new vision.

“There're huge opportunities to sort of hack disease [with] the net result of a population able to spend more time living well... more active and productive, and creative at work. So this will feed through to the economy. And also it has the potential to reduce the demand on a current health and care service, which is inexorably moving higher in terms of costs than the economy can afford.

Because at the moment, we're not very effective at looking after people. This really turns everything upside down... a really exciting vision for the future.”

We also touch on what might happen if we do not grab the myriad opportunities – such as the disintermediation of public healthcare by silicon valley tech companies.

We touch on ‘Valuism’ (a subject for a later interview with its founder, Paul Barnett) in a world where money dominates the Neo-liberal era, where maximising shareholder value has become “not only a culture but a fiduciary duty” and the economy and society is measured primarily by GDP – the economy comes first and everything comes second. Thus financialising almost every aspect of life.

But that way of thinking creates externalities, whether it's polluting the environment damaging the ozone layer or global warming - things which historically been ‘off balance sheet’ - not accounted for in our economics... We are now seeing these ‘externalities’ coming back to haunt us because we live in a finite world with finite resources, which we can't exploit forever....

Watch the video interview at https://youtu.be/y1V1LgvGiRk

See HumaneEconomics.co for more and to join the linear-conference and network.