Hi, this is Nick Webb and welcome back to another episode of Fixing Healthcare. This is module number three in my five module program and we are talking about how can we improve healthcare, fix healthcare by reestablishing the competency of that amazing relationship between doctors and patients. Now, in the last module, I talked about time we need to give doctors and caregivers the time they need to be able to have for the caregiver to understand that patient at an emotive and an ethnographic level. In other words, understanding the patient beyond them as a, a set of biological data points and rather than it being a  transaction, it has to be a relationship and relationships require time. So doctors need more time with their patients because they need to understand the patients. What is their mental health issues? How can I prescribe solutions that are going to be compliant for this patient? What are the kinds of environmental and social and economic situations are occurring in this patient's life that are causing some of the manifestations of their condition? Understanding them at that level allows us to intervene not automatically through a prescription, but through an improved and permanent change in their lifestyle. 

Now, the problem is, is that there are consultants out there that are doing patient throughput analysis, that are showing hospitals and clinics how to significantly increase the amount of patients that go through the conveyor belt of a clinic. What does that ultimately mean? That means that the patients have very little time with a doctor so a patient comes to a doctor. They're 30 pounds overweight, they're hypertensive. They have a horrible lipid profile. They have other conditions, other comorbidities. And so what does the doctor do today they write him a prescription for statin drug and get them out because the conveyor belt is still moving. We need to change that. We need to give doctors instead of prescription default scenarios, we need to give them resources, wellness resources, prevention, resources and training resources to focus on keeping that patient healthy, rather than reactively treating that patient for disease. 

So we talked about time before. Today we're going to talk about data. Now, this is exciting for me, because where we are ultimately going we're going to see this over the next three to five years. The COVID-19 was very, very instrumental in weaponizing rapid innovation towards the movement of continuous patient monitoring. But before I continue, I know there's a lot of people that worry when they hear continuous patient monitoring. Isn't this part of the conspiracy, the so called surveillance economy to sell me stuff? Look, I can remember 30 years ago when they were saying that Amazon was going to be a guaranteed failure because nobody in their right mind would ever put a credit card on the internet. And guess what? It worked out for Amazon, people realized that the risk of exposing their credit card number, in contrast to the benefits of Amazon, that the benefits outweighed the risk. Right? And the risk has been extremely minimal. Same thing is true. Nobody cares about your medical condition. Nobody wants to monitor it. And we're going to use blockchain and other technologies. I know this sounds coarse, but that's the truth. We are going to be able to protect your data, no problem. 

The bigger concern is what are you going to do to protect your life? Because continuous patient monitoring can take dozens and dozens of bio signals, it can send it to an artificial machine. These are already in development. I have several patents on these technologies myself, and the learning machine can take, do the heavy lifting the grunt work, if you will, of looking at all of your vital signs, always every day.