How to save a few billion lives — The future of healthcare

I spent a lot of time in and around hospitals last year.

More time than I have spent in the previous 7 years combined.

Coincidentally, a lot of my friends also spent a lot of time in hospitals, caring for loved ones, and getting medical help themselves. The sentiment has been the same across the board.

Disappointment.

Is this what ‘modern medicine’ is!!?

It definitely doesn't feel very modern to me, especially because a lot of the diagnosis process sometimes feels like guesswork to me.

The problem?

1. Doctors have to rely on a patient’s ability to accurately describe what they’re going through, and most people aren’t great at doing this. The doctor also needs to know that the patient is telling the truth and not exaggerating, without asking humiliating questions or saying things like ‘It’s all in your head’.
2. Many diseases have similar symptoms, so this means that patients may need to do multiple tests to narrow down the issue. This takes tiiiimmmeeeee, and depending on where you live, it costs money too.
3. If a doctor has never dealt with a particular illness before, their chances of diagnosing it early in a patient are quite low. This is unfair to the patient and unfair to the doctor too.
4. There’s also a risk of wrong diagnosis, which means that the patient could be getting the wrong treatment while their actual condition is getting worse.

Do you see what the problem is now?

Does this sound like a ‘modern’ way to handle human lives?

Exactly. You understand why I’m upset now.

A possible solution?

Let’s think in first principles.

The human body is a system with various smaller systems that work independently but together to carry out various functions. Right?

Doesn’t that sound familiar?

In a simplistic way, isn’t that sort of what computers are?

Well, from my experience working in tech, we have something called logs. Logs are basically a chronological record of events that happen within a system. Basically, it keeps track of what happens and when it happens.

When there’s an issue in a piece of software platform, the first thing support teams ask internally is, “Have you checked the logs?”, and if you don’t have logs, then you’d look unserious because it is the fastest way to identify issues.

If we agree that having logs is the standard for software, then why do we accept less when it comes to human lives?

Why don’t human beings have logs?

Something in our body that keeps track of what’s happening in our body day to day.

Tracking what you eat, when your blood sugar spikes, when your insulin production is low, when there might be a cancerous cell or when your cholesterol is high…

A device that keeps track of the things that hospitals ask us to do tests for.

I mean, doesn’t it sound crazy to you that there are people walking down the street right now with early-stage cancer, and they don’t even know?!

People who can be saved by early detection and treatment!

That is why I think that any serious company in the health tech space should be working on this.

A form of log for the human body.

The company that figures out how to do this at scale will save a lot of lives and also become wealthy beyond their imagination.

It needs to be:

1. Affordable or even free.
2. Easy to get reports from for expert analysis.
3. Have an early warning system that informs people when things are getting out of control e.g. when their kidney is being overworked.
4. It needs to exist in a form that makes it easy to use/have in your body.

Its benefits will include but not be limited to:

1. Longer life expectancy for human beings.
2. Cheaper cost of medicine and medical insurance. In fact, I see this being the standard for medical insurance. e.g your premium will be higher if you don’t have this.
3. A better quality of life for human beings.
4. A better understanding of how the human body works

If you’re reading this, this is your sign to demand from the medical world that we need logs for our bodies!

It's the right thing to do.

It's the only thing to do.

WE NEED LOGS!!!

PS: This post is not to attack Medical practitioners. You do a lot of awesome work with the tools you have. I just think you deserve better tools. Also,I am not a medical practitioner, but I think I know a process that can be improved when I see one.

Hey thanks for reading this, I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, you can find some of my other LinkedIn articles here and you can find my articles on other interesting topics here