Four For Friday | July 12, 2024
LF131 | Economic value of health prevention, OpenAI and Thrive launch health JV, WEF's new longevity challenge and framing the climate crisis
Welcome to Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week. Enjoy!
Author’s note: Last week’s LF was skipped due to meetings in Japan (Tokyo and Tohoku), which delivered a wealth of new ideas and insights about healthy longevity in Japan (and some nice food spots too).
View from the top of the Tokyo Dome Hotel showing how Tokyo’s remarkable skyline, and if you look closely, the almost complete lack of traffic (albeit, a Sunday evening).
The macroeconomic benefits of preventive health
LBS professor Andrew Scott, of the 100 Year Life and The Longevity Imperative-fame, has just released another study he co-authored, which provides some much-needed quantification of the economic benefits of preventive health.
Most national health systems spend less than 5% of their budgets on prevention, which fall victim to the short term reality of political cycles and siloed nature of government budgeting. This Tony Blair Institute study found a roughly 1% boost to annual UK GDP over the next 10 years (worth £26.3 billion annually) would be delivered by ‘a 20% reduction in the incidence of six major disease categories that are keeping people out of work – cancer, cardiovascular disease (CVD), chronic respiratory illness, diabetes and mental-health and musculoskeletal disorders’.
The report notes how the UK has started to lag behind its peers, with a failing NHS and a particularly large increase in the number of working age people out of work due to poor health (increased to 6.7% today from from 4.8% in 2018). Addressing this requires us to harness novel technology and AI, which holds promise across a number of dimensions:
“Improvements in understanding disease development, genetic testing to refine risk calculation and treatment choices, novel imaging to better identify and characterise disease earlier, blood tests that can predict the risk of future diseases remarkably well before any clinical sign, and the emergence of new therapeutics together raise the tantalising prospect of a 21st-century health system adapted to 21st-century longevity with a focus not on treating disease but on keeping people healthy for longer.”
OpenAI and Thrive Global team up to democratize health (-AI)
How much of your own personal health data will you be willing to give to OpenAI? Given the track record of Big Tech, many people will be happy trading in their data for more personalized and helpful recommendations to improve their health and wellness, which is the thesis of the new joint venture between OpenAI and Thrive Global: Thrive AI Health.
It won’t offer direct diagnosis, but personalized recommendations for improvements across sleep, nutrition, fitness, stress management, and social connection. Clearly this will be going head-to-head with Google’s health and wellness coach, and no doubt a plethora of others. More venture-funded innovation to lower the barriers to personalized health and wellness innovation is welcome - bring it on!
WEF’s new ‘Prospering in Longevity’ open - deadline July 22
Note: this is cross posted from Issue 07 of my longevity-focused newsletter, Healthspans.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) and Manulife have launched a new longevity innovation challenge, drawing on the WEF’s six longevity principlespublished this February. To recap these principles are:
Ensuring financial resilience across key life events
Provide universal access to impartial financial education
Prioritize healthy ageing as key for the longevity economy
Evolve jobs and lifelong skill-building for a multigenerational workforce
Design systems and environments for social connection and purpose
Address longevity inequalities across gender, race and class
The ‘Prospering in Longevity Challenge’ seeks game-changing solutions for preventative healthcare and financial well-being. They’re looking for solutions with business viability (e.g. sustainable business model), impact (e.g. robust impact metrics and measures) and ‘innovation and replicability’ (e.g. being innovative but also able to scale across geographies). Got a brilliant idea? Apply here by July 22!
Flipping the script on climate change
Interesting research from Harvard drawing on educational psychology to suggest a different approach to communicating about the climate crisis. Rather than a ‘deficit approach’ which emphasises all the things that are going wrong, an ‘asset approach’ emphasises the wins that are being made.
This counters the phenomenon of crisis fatigue and also may reduce the group trauma and mental health repercussions that themselves have significant downstream costs.
This week’s bonus…
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen