Opportunity

Focus the health tech sector on community health metrics.

Recommendation

The nation should create market incentives for innovation using liberated data that links into an intelligent health grid for improving community health outcomes.

Today we have a need but not a market for improving community health. We are blind without the health data in a unified source that is communicable to all as metrics for improvement. Therefore we need to remove restrictions to putting data in the hands of entrepreneurs and organizations ready to improve the health of communities. Right now large data stores from government health agencies (Department of Veterans Affairs, Medicare, Department of Defense, etc.) are unavailable to innovators in Silicon Valley and around the nation. We need to liberate data while creating business incentives for improving population health. This data can flow through existing smart-grid technology to create feedback for smarter individual and community health choices.

The following prerequisites need to be met to bring the potential of the tech sector to community health:

• Define shared (community) health metrics and align payment systems for health outcomes; big data can bring us big health gains

• Develop the business models that offer incentives for prevention and pre-disease diagnosis so that caregivers and discovery scientists work with communities to convert personal data clouds into actionable information for improving community health 

• Use regional partnerships between major clinical institutions, systems biology institutes and communities with consumers and patients learning to improve population and individual health

• Build community storage systems for multi-source integrated health data, including genomics, proteomics, sensors, lab data, pharmaceutical prescriptions, environmental data, social media data and non-obvious health data that will emerge as we learn to improve community health 

• Shape policies providing individual ownership of personal data while offering individuals and communities the ability to opt in for release of their data to tech vendors and entrepreneurs 

• Establish sites to rapidly test innovations in community health then get the evidence distributed for iterating successes in multiple communities

• Revamp regulation to make it sensible and supportive for community health gains. The FDA (e.g., when regulating mobile apps) and HIPAA should support the health tech sector capacity to improve community health.