Innovations That Pave the Way for the Next Generation in Healthcare with Tom Blue

Tom Blue stumbled into the world of healthcare innovation for primary care and personal health management around 22 years ago, when he was working with  the NASA Langley Research Center, which later led him to take part in setting up the first concierge medical practice in Virginia. 

Such a novel service model came with the challenge of creating a compelling value proposition that would encourage people to invest their own money on a service not covered by insurance. 

During the initial set-up process, Tom serendipitously found a space next to Richmond’s first electron beam tomography scanner. This allowed the practice to integrate coronary calcium scoring as part of their services. They later added advanced lipid testing, and other tests that had them offering one of the best cardiovascular risk assessment and management services in the US.

One valuable insight Tom learned from this experience, that has become a major driving force in his professional life, is that there are two worlds of medicine: the world that everyone knows, and this “future world” with medical advancements that actually already exist today, but only a few people had access to.

In this episode, we discuss the shortcomings of the US healthcare system, and  why the payer system shouldn’t be the curator of the healthcare services that we make available to ourselves, to properly manage our own health.

Topics discussed in this episode:

- What led Tom to focus on innovating around delivery models for next-generation healthcare, in reducing the translational gap in the implementation of healthcare services, and in finding ways to do this at greater scale

- The two worlds of medicine, and what enables a person to have access to the future of medicine today

- Why the payer system shouldn’t be the curator of the healthcare services that we make available to ourselves to manage our health

- The erroneous understanding and expectations of most healthcare consumers on health insurance

- The dramatic cultural evolution of the health values of the consumer population over the past 20 years

- How the locus of control for health has made a 180 degree shift from predestination to self determinism

- The need for synthesizing data to make the information more digestible for health consumers, and enable health practitioners to deliver higher impact consultations