The general trend has been that we’re living longer – but life expectancy is falling and the gap in healthy life expectancy is widening between richest and poorest – in the richest countries in the world.[i]

The average American now has the same chance of living a healthy life as someone from Blackpool which has the lowest healthy life expectancy in England.

In the UK, we spend a fifth of our lives in poor health – and the poorer you are, the greater the proportion of your life spent in poor health. We must close the gap of the almost 20-year difference in healthy life expectancy between the richest and the poorest.

This needs to change – and is the burning platform.  We have an entrenched 'sickcare' model and invest disproportionately in the cure without understanding and addressing the cause.  

Despite healthcare advances, we have not integrated the biological, psychological and behavioural factors of ageing across the lifecourse that represent 80% of the determinants of our health.

System change is needed to focus on health as an asset to invest in, not as a cost in an increasingly unsustainable healthcare system buckling under the burden of poor health driven by growing health inequalities and ageing populations. 

The time is now to address the system change needed mobilising technology and science to accelerate healthy people, planet and economic growth. Working with my colleagues at National Innovation Centre for Ageing (NICA), Dr Nic Palmarini and Professor Lynne Corner, we launched the Quantum Healthy Longevity Innovation Mission in November 2022, supporting the UK government’s ambition to harness frontier technologies including AI, quantum computing and systems biology to tackle big, real-world problems in climate and health. 

As set out in the Lancet[ii] and supported by world leaders, including Nir Barzilai, David Furman, Brian Kennedy, Luigi Ferrucci, Linda Fried, Alex Zhavoronkov and others, we need to understand environmental factors encompassed in the exposome in terms of helping humans not only to survive but to thrive in their ‘real world’.  

At the heart of the mission is a deep, integrated understanding of people’s needs and aspirations that contribute to maintaining health across the full life course[iii]. This embraces the emerging research in computational approaches to the psychology of ageing that links with biological and biomedical ageing as well as the behavioural aspects for ageing well, including nurturing brain health and investing in brain capital.

We need to understand environmental factors encompassed in the exposome[iv]  in terms of helping humans not only to survive but to have the resilience to adapt to stress and to thrive in their ‘real world’.

The ‘exposome’ reflects the complex exposures humans face, which can lead to systemic chronic inflammation affecting lifelong health.[v] The exposome includes the food we ingest, the air we breathe, the objects we touch, the psychological stresses we face, and the activities in which we engage.[vi]

We also know that some people are more resilient than others when confronted with stress in their environment.[vii] Resilience is a concept getting more attention and relates to understanding how humans adapt to adverse conditions and recover from them, and reflects individual qualities such as personal control, a sense of purpose, and optimism. Stress resilience can be improved, but the outcomes and effects depend on the type of intervention and the species treated.[viii]

We know human psychology is complex and changing behaviour tough.  We need to make it easy to keep healthy and well. And cheap.  We need the right environments to make the best choices.  The simple fact is that if it is not easy or cheap or woven into the fabric of our daily lives, hopes and dreams it won’t happen.  

Sometimes it is the simple hope that a quick fix will work.  A recent article in JAMA[ix] said that more than half of adults take dietary supplements; In 2021, people in the US spent an estimated almost $50 billion on dietary supplements and the dietary supplement industry spent about $900 million on marketing.  Most of the 90,000 supplements on the market have no evidence whatsoever that they improve health.

What many companies are selling are quick-fix hopes, not necessarily solutions that work.  Hope is reflected in the placebo effect of course too- some say it will add two years to your healthy life expectancy. And yes, it is true there is a lot of hype in longevity research.  No single drug or molecule yet can outdo the effects of a bad lifestyle or being in the poverty trap- if you do not eat healthily and you don't sleep or exercise enough or are stressed through financial worry and loss of hope, 10 years or more of your life is at risk.

Psychological ageing is under-explored in research – yet connecting health and mind seems to be the focus of most of the longevity clinics emerging around the world treating real human beings. 

My colleagues and I at NICA are exploring this and ways to increase societal brain health and brain capital.[x] 

Psychological ageing has been a topic of high interest to Alex Zhavoronkov, Founder of Insilico Medicine and Deep Longevity.  They recently published a paper analysing data from almost 12,000 adults that showed psychological factors substantially contribute to biological ageing. The pace of ageing detected with a novel ageing clock was shown to accelerate if a person feels unhappy, lonely, or has trouble sleeping.[xi]

All this points to the need for solutions that work not only on the biology of ageing but the psychology of ageing too, and also overall resilience, the ability of the body to adapt to stress.

We need solutions which give people hope and allows them to follow their purpose, their reason for keeping alive.

We also need solutions that are easy and accessible to everyone.   Health needs to embrace the revolutions that have already come to other aspects in our lives, like banking and shopping – we are used to convenience and choice, and ever more so.

The UK is poised to be a ‘test bed for health’ to understand these links between biology, psychology and behaviour and drive next generation products and services.

There are a number of levers we can pull to drive this step-change in thinking and action.

First, we need to harness science and technology more effectively to drive impact at scale.  The latest developments are increasingly telling us we need to move upstream in health prevention.  There has been a huge wave of biology breakthroughs spanning ‘omics’ research and the ‘hallmarks of ageing’, as well as a better understanding of biological systems on the whole[xii] [xiii].

In parallel of course we have seen an explosion in analytical and modelling technologies. Thanks to AI, we are getting increasingly powerful tools.  DeepMind recently won the Breakthrough Prize for its AlphaFold tool that has successfully predicted the structure of nearly all proteins known to science.

The latest AI kid on the block now is of course the large language models / including ChatGPT4 – with many arguing, including the likes of Elon Musk, we are galloping dangerously ahead without the governance to keep the more intelligent machines than humans from destroying us.  Musk is now proposing ‘TruthGPT’ incentivised around understanding the universe so there is an inbuilt mechanism for algorithms not to learn how to destroy it.

We have new companies pioneering AI-driven systems using ageing clocks and biomarkers to analyse biological big data at scale. Humanity[xiv], for example,  is using ageing clocks and biomarkers to give users insight into their current risk rating and health recommendations around factors such as weight, sleep, physical exercise, lifestyle, and diet.

And this means more than drugs to target the underlying biology of ageing.  We need to look at the entire exposome, that describes all the factors that influence our health and ageing trajectory, including behaviour, environment and lifestyle.

We need to activate citizens and consumers too of course.  Health data is plentiful, especially since most data we generate in our lives will affect or relate to our health in some way.   This is gold stuff for biomarkers in ageing research.

Smartphone apps and wearable devices provide a largely untapped source of data about health behaviours in people’s day-to-day environments. The data are large in scale, collected at low cost, and often recorded in an automatic fashion, providing a powerful complement to traditional surveillance studies and controlled trials.

It is therefore not a surprise that digital biomarkers have gained large interest during recent years as non-invasive markers of health and disease. As they typically allow for continuous monitoring, they may also be used for the development of biomarkers to measure resilience too, because they can measure ‘the ability to adapt’ in response to an external challenge (whether it be food, stress, activity, etc) reflecting the resilience of the biological system.

Digital measurements have the advantage of being measured non-invasively, passively, continuously, and in a real-world context. This is why Alzheimer’s Research UK initiated the Early Detection of Neurodegenerative Disease study (or EDoN) with the Gates Foundation- using digital biomarkers via smartwatch to detect diseases like Alzheimer’s years before the symptoms of dementia are evident.

A prime example of citizen health engagement in the UK is Our Future Health[xv], a partner in our mission, that has been set up recently to recruit 5 million healthy volunteers in a major health study which aims to predict who will get ill in their later years even before they show symptoms to come up with new ways to prevent, detect and treat diseases such as dementia, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and stroke. 

The UK government is committed to leveraging ‘pro-innovation’ regulatory reform, to unlock the potential of exponential advances we are seeing in science and technology. This forms part of its ambitions to be a science and tech superpower while still focussed on applying its so-called ‘Levelling Up’ policy agenda to increase healthy life expectancy and reduce health & wellbeing disparities in their government manifesto commitment to drive economic growth ahead.[xvi]

The government have commissioned a Pro-Innovation Regulation of Technologies Review which will focus on identifying opportunities and enablers for digital technologies, life sciences and green industries.

The UK Digital Strategy commits to rolling out world-class digital infrastructure across the UK and promoting data as an enabler, including looking at persona data wallets and intermediaries, improving access for researchers and analysts to citizen-consented data which can then link to the so-called ‘world’s largest longitudinal cradle to grave dataset’ from NHS healthcare records.[xvii] [xviii]

The Life Sciences Vision published last year[xix] in the UK outlines 7 critical healthcare challenges that government, industry, the NHS, academia and medical research charities can work together on at speed to solve – from addressing ageing to tackling dementia. 

This was the first time that research in the biology of ageing was deemed a priority, and is one of the 7 ‘challenges’.  Exploring the role of ageing biomarkers to move forward clinical trials to prevent and/or delay the diseases of ageing is important here.  Biomarkers could accelerate and shorten clinical trial times by acting as surrogate endpoints upstream in the health trajectory, and measure risk and progression of major age-related diseases.  However, there Is no agreed standard or list of approved ageing biomarkers for clinical trials; and there is no international consensus or set of validated biomarkers of ageing or ageing clocks. 

This gap can be addressed by data-intensive omics, capture of digital biomarkers through ‘effortless AI’ (eg wearables) and application of machine learning, quantum computing and systems biology. A new study in JAMA[xx] shows that it is feasible to determine a person’s degree of resilience based on an individual’s heart rate variability that can be measured using smartwatches.

The UK government is also committed to finance reform, for example, giving pension funds more freedom to invest in innovation, as well as unlocking capital to support scale-ups and venture capital.

Through my work at Business for Health, we are taking a steer from what has guided the climate change agenda and net zero targets with the ambition to bring ‘Health’ into ESG-driven investment, that is, ‘ESHG’.

An ESHG framework focussed on equitable health outcomes will help the business and investor community drive positive change and impact as part of the Quantum Healthy Longevity Innovation Mission[xxi], through long-term strategic projects that reduce the risk factors that can damage health, like unhealthy food, poor work, pollution, and poor housing, and are incentivised and measured by their impact on positive health and wellbeing outcomes.  This aligns with aims of the international Reform for Resilience Commission[xxii] that called for the global community at COP27 and Davos in 2023 to strengthen ESG standards by incorporating health metrics to build more resilient societies.

There are three core elements of the mission. First, we are designing a platform to support an open, federated, multidisciplinary approach to share data, methodologies and to contribute to the build and evolution of ideas to enable public and private organisations to share data for public benefit, while ensuring public trust.

Second, the AI platform will evolve taking innovation out of the laboratory and directly into peoples’ homes, with healthy products and services designed and developed for unmet needs that make a real and measurable difference to people's lives and to planetary health too.

Third, we want to create an open distributed Biomarker Data Bank linked to other Trusted Research Environments (TRE)- to translate insights from the exposome into intelligence, application, and commercialisation of science into societal benefit for all.  A key output would be an atlas of geroprotective interventions.

This will inform the evolution of ‘Longevity Cities’, a strategic initiative developed by the National Innovation Centre for Ageing, and supported by the World Bank, that is rooted in the principle of 'health is the new wealth'.[xxiii]

The first Longevity City is being trialled in Newcastle where NICA is based, and is acting as the template for cities around the world, including Milan, Tokyo, Barcelona, and Hamilton in Canada.

The aim is to create environments with products and services, or ‘Longevity-as a-Service’, that make it easy for people to follow healthier lifestyles well before old age, enabled by infrastructure, services and policies that also influence the social determinants responsible for 80% of our health.

In summary, our mission will harness developments in longevity science and data innovation to capture deep insights from genetics, biological, behavioural, environmental and financial data; harnessing such ‘life data’.

The prize is huge if we can encourage citizens to share their data for public benefit while still enabling commercial enterprises to prosper. Such ‘data philanthropy’ would accelerate the prevention and cure for dementia, for example, by delving deep into the complexities of the ageing process. 

[i] IHME Global Burden of Disease

[ii] Woods T, Palmarini N, Corner L et all. Quantum Healthy Longevity for healthy people, planet, and growth, Lancet, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2666-7568(22)00267-7

[iii] Ferrucci L. Geroscience Brings New Focus on the Life-Course Approach to Health in Humans. Innov Aging. 2020 Dec 16;4(Suppl 1):803. doi: 10.1093/geroni/igaa057.2914. PMCID: PMC7742840

[iv] Wild CP. Complementing the genome with an “exposome”: the outstanding challenge of environmental exposure measurement in molecular epidemiology.Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2005; 14: 1847-1850

[v] Furman D, Campisi J, Verdin E  et al. Chronic inflammation in the etiology of disease across the life span.Nat Med. 2019; 25: 1822-1832

[vi] Paul G. Shiels, Johanna Painer, Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Richard J. Johnson, Jaime J. Miranda, Peter Stenvinkel; Manipulating the exposome to enable better ageing. Biochem J 30 July 2021; 478 (14): 2889–2898. doi: https://doi.org/10.1042/BCJ20200958

[vii] Dantzer R et al. Resilience and Immunity. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity 74 (2018)2 8-42;  https:/ /doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2018.08.010

[viii] Liu H1, Zhang, JiY  and Yang L, Biological and Psychological Perspectives of Resilience: Is It Possible to Improve Stress Resistance? Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 2018. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2018.00326

[ix] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2793472%20-%20jed220043r2

[x] Eyre H, Faulkenberg M, Das S et al. Brain capital: an emerging investment opportunity. Psychiatric Times. 2022; https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/brain-capital-an-emerging-investment-opportunity

[xi] Galkin F, Kochetov K, Koldasbayeva D, Faria M, Fung HH, Chen AX, Zhavoronkov A. Psychological factors substantially contribute to biological aging: evidence from the aging rate in Chinese older adults. Aging (Albany NY). 2022 Sep 27; 14:7206-7222 . https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.204264

[xii]  López-Otín C, Blasco MA, Partridge L, Serrano M, Kroemer G. The hallmarks of aging. Cell. 2013 Jun 6;153(6):1194-217. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2013.05.039. PMID: 23746838; PMCID: PMC3836174

[xiii] Le Couteur DG, Barzilai N. New horizons in life extension, healthspan extension and exceptional longevity. Age Ageing. 2022 Aug 2;51(8):afac156. doi: 10.1093/ageing/afac156. PMID: 35932241; PMCID: PMC9356533.

[xiv] http://www.humanity.health

[xv] Our Future Health, https://ourfuturehealth.org.uk/

[xvi] Science and Technology Framework, March 2023, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1140217/uk-science-technology-framework.pdf

[xvii] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/digital-regulation-driving-growth-and-unlocking-innovation/plan-for-digital-regulation-developing-an-outcomes-monitoring-framework

[xviii] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/data-saves-lives-reshaping-health-and-social-care-with-data/data-saves-lives-reshaping-health-and-social-care-with-data

[xix] Life Sciences Vision, July 2021, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/life-sciences-vision

[xx] Hirten R et al. A machine learning approach to determine resilience utilizing wearable device data: analysis of an observational cohort https://academic.oup.com/jamiaopen/article/6/2/ooad029/7147662

[xxi] https://www.businessforhealth.org/new-events

[xxii] Reform for Resilience, https://www.r4rx.org/cop27-statement-2022

[xxiii] https://uknica.co.uk/blog/2021/09/04/health-is-the-new-wealth-newcastle-city-of-longevity/

KEYNOTE ADDRESS AT UK SPINE

CONFERENCE 28 JUNE 2022

The general trend has been that we’re living longer – but life expectancy has begun to stagnate in the UK and is actually falling in the USA. In the UK, we spend a fifth of our lives in poor health – and the poorer you are, the greater the proportion of your life spent in poor health. We must close the gap of the almost 20-year difference in healthy life expectancy between the richest and the poorest.

In the year 2000, health spending in the UK represented 27 percent of day-to-day public service spending. By 2024, it is set to account for 44 percent. 44 Percent!  The NHS spends vast sums treating people whose conditions are avoidable - and by some estimates 40 percent of its costs go on treating preventable conditions. The burden of just one preventable disease – cardiovascular disease – costs society over £18 billion.

This needs to change – and is the burning platform for all of us at this conference. We need to shift sickcare to a new model. We need to get to a place where we’re healthier for longer.   Compressing morbidity is still a major challenge, but as we are seeing with research on the biology of ageing, there are common pathways in major chronic diseases that lead to multiple morbidities that you might be able to manipulate or influence.

The pandemic has been helpful to highlight that a geroscience approach, targeting ageing processes to prevent multimorbidity, is an important element to improving healthspan and compress morbidity.

The Life Sciences Vision published last year outlines 7 critical healthcare missions that government, industry, the NHS, academia and medical research charities can work together on at speed to solve – from addressing ageing to tackling dementia.

This was the first time that research in the science of ageing was deemed a priority.   To spur collaboration in this area, and to achieve these missions it was fantastic to see the launch of  UK Ageing Network being led by Richard Farragher and friend Lynne Cox, here at the conference who I know well from working with her, especially in connection with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Longevity. 

One of the 11 groups in the Ageing Network is the Cognitive Frailty Interdisciplinary Network (CFIN) looking at the emerging discipline of brain capital - being explored by Lynne Corner and Nic Palmarini at the National Innovation Centre for Ageing, or NICA, both of whom I will be working closely with ahead in my new role at NICA to promote the discipline of Healthy Longevity ahead.

It is an incredibly exciting time to be working in ageing science, particularly as it may be possible not only to treat age-related diseases at cause, but also to take a preventative approach- which I am passionate about.

At the heart of improved health and wellbeing is a deep, integrated understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that contribute to maintaining health across the full life course. And this will only be possible if we change how we conduct ageing research, both by bringing together scientists from many disciplines with the public, clinicians, policymakers and industry.

And this means more than drugs to target the underlying biology of ageing.  We need to look at the entire exposome, that describes all the factors that influence our health and ageing trajectory, including behaviour, environment and lifestyle.

There is so much we can do now of course that will have a dramatic impact on our healthspan.  Walking 20 minutes a day has been shown to have a dramatic impact – Most of you will know the research published in 2015 (in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition)  that found that a brisk 20-minute walk every day could reduce risk of death by upwards of 30%. 

Research by RAND showed that this simple activity would generate not only health benefits but economic benefits too. According to their study, if every adult between ages 18 and 64 walked an extra 15 minutes a day, the world economic production would see an increase of about $100 billion, every year.  Even for inactive people over the age of 40, introducing 20 minutes of jogging every day could give them an extra 3.2 years of life.

Blood pressure control is another example where a simple intervention could have a massive impact.  In the last few months I have received two text messages from my GP to ask to  get my blood pressure checked-if we had the whole population getting their blood pressure checked and receiving support on how to reduce their blood pressure, in one swoop we would wipe out a significant so-called silent killer of many people- and this data could drive a colossal amount of research on the risk of high blood pressure and how to offer the best intervention to reduce it at both individual and population health levels.

So why aren’t we doing these most basic of things that could have such a dramatic impact on our health - and wealth?  Simple. Human behaviour is complex and changing behaviour tough.  We need to make it easy to keep healthy and well. And cheap.  We need the right environments to make the best choices.  The simple fact is that if it is not easy or cheap or woven into the fabric of our daily lives, hopes and dreams it won’t happen.  

We are always looking for the quick fix, the miracle cure, indeed, a pill that could ‘cure’ all of our ills, indeed, even ageing itself.

We need the hope too.  Sometimes it is the simple hope that a quick fix will work.  I was struck by a JAMA article tweeted out by Eric Topol last week that said that more than half of adults take dietary supplements; In 2021, people in the US spent an estimated almost $50 billion on dietary supplements and the dietary supplement industry spent about $900 million on marketing.  Most of these supplements have no evidence whatsoever that they improve health.  I have to confess I am a bit of a sucker too, taking quite a few supplements myself (though like to think of myself more as a guinea pig…not a victim of marketing).  I am only human.  We are all only human.  And we will come back to this point in a bit.

What companies are selling are quick-fix hopes, not necessarily solutions that work. I admire the work that Brian Kennedy is doing in Singapore, using ageing biomarkers to evaluate the efficacy of supplements to increase our heathspan- a rigorous evidence-based approach that is sorely needed in this space.

He also argues that simple things will make a huge difference.  There is a lot of hype in longevity research - No single drug or molecule yet can outdo the effects of a bad lifestyle or being in the poverty trap- if you do not eat healthily and you don't sleep or exercise enough or are stressed through financial worry and loss of hope, 10 years or more of your life is at risk.

More or less, 25 percent of our rate of ageing and lifespan is determined by genetics (except for supercentenarians who have genetic advantages- the source of much research at the moment, including by Nir Barzilai, leading the TAME metformin trial).

The other 75 percent is lifestyle.  75% down to lifestyle shows how we live really matters. Mindset, movement, nutrition, environment, stress, rest, and connection are some of the foundational elements that either speed up or help to slow the rate of ageing. 

Brian Kennedy says this too, and he was one of the 30 experts I interviewed for my book published a year and a bit ago- Live Longer with AI.  Every single one of the experts I asked about what they do to keep healthy and well boiled down to very simple things, mainly connected to lifestyle- but passion and purpose was also central.

Now, hope can be a by-product of taking a pill but our sense of purpose cannot be bought or sold.    Some of you will know the epidemic of ‘deaths by despair’, that Angus Deacon talks about in connection with the US opioid crisis. Loss of hope, loss of purpose, loss of meaning in life, leads to premature mortality. 

Psychological ageing is under-explored and my colleagues at NICA are exploring ways to increase societal brain health and brain capital.

So-called ‘psychological age’ has been described as your chronological age in a healthy state without mental illness or depression, stress, anxiety, how do you feel in the context of your life, and in the context of your biological health. 

Psychological ageing has been a topic of high interest to Alex Zhavoronkhov, Founder of Insilico Medicine and Deep Longevity, a friend and colleague and who I interviewed for my book too.  He has been doing ground-breaking work in AI-driven drug discovery and ageing biomarker research.

As we know, biomarkers of ageing can accurately quantify the human ageing process using various biological data types, commonly referred to as the "ageing clocks", and are among the most important recent advances in the field of longevity research.

Together with Peter Diamandis, the founder of XPRIZE and Singularity University, Alex and his Deep Longevity team published in late 2020 the first AI-powered psychological ageing clocks to analyse and interpret psychosocial factors in ageing.

This work looks at how your state of mind and psychological state affects the ageing process.  We know that humans are born, develop, reproduce, take care of their young, and then gradually decline and die. However, humans are conscious intelligent species and change their behaviour, priorities, beliefs, and attitude, during life.

Laura Carstensen at Stanford developed the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory, or SST, which shows that the perception of time plays a fundamental role in the selection and pursuit of life goals and can be manipulated too to affect behaviour.

Applying this SST theory, Zhavoronkov and Diamandis developed psychological ageing clocks on large independent datasets and discovered that higher subjective age (the SubjAge clock) is very predictive of all-cause mortality. People predicted to be five years or older than their chronological age have a much higher chance of dying.

They also showed how SubjAge can be manipulated therapeutically to make patients feel younger and thus reduce their mortality risk. For example, developing openness to new experiences can reduce SubjAge prediction by seven years.

They concluded that a person’s mindset may determine the decisions that ultimately affect their overall health.  This concurs with other recent studies that show a sense of optimism has been linked to increased healthspan.  Being optimistic decreases psychological age.

Zhavoronkov and his Deep Longevity team has just published a paper in ageing with Harvard researchers on enhancing future well-being with AI and are working on a follow-up study on the effect of happiness on physiological measures of ageing.

Just a small personal anecdote conned to this work on psychological ageing.  I was speaking about how much joy I get from dancing with Greg Bailey, CEO of Juvenescence, at a recent Longevity conference. 

He said the best way not to age is to [quote unquote] ‘pretend you are 30: listen to that music from 30 years ago’. He referenced the 'Counterclockwise' experiment that Harvard Professor Ellen Langer did way back in 1979.  The study looked at what effects turning back the clock psychologically would have on an older adult’s physiological state. The stated research question was, ‘If we put the mind back twenty years, would the body reflect this change? The experiment showed, yes. Changing thought patterns can slow ageing.

All this points to the need for solutions that work not only on the biology of ageing but the psychology of ageing too.  This is what NICA are doing and will lend huge insight and evidence too into why tacking ageism is so important.  Ageing stereotypes influence the ageing process itself, and this is why ageism is such a barrier to living longer well.  Ageism keeps on coming up as the biggest challenge we face to really embrace the longevity dividend that people like Andrew Scott, talks about, the author who wrote the incredibly successful book, The 100-year Life. 

Andrew Scott together with Harvard Professor David Sinclair recently published their study in Nature- showing that a slowdown in ageing that increases life expectancy by 1 year is worth $38 trillion dollars.  That’s a lot of potential.  And alot of potential wasted if ageism gets in the way.

We need solutions that are easy and accessible to everyone and which gives people hope and allows them to follow their purpose, their reason for keeping alive- and not to be a victim of ageism.

I am not sure that ageing research in animal models will reveal much on the link between our physiology, our sense of optimism, hope, purpose, and reason for being, which the Japanese call ‘Ikigai’.   This is the test to see what works at a basic physiological model that will play out in human studies ultimately measured in increased healthspan.  Yes, we are animals, but no, we are not quite like them.  We have emotions, belief systems, need for meaning and a higher order of purpose in life that extends beyond just a survival instinct and need to reproduce- that does separate us I think, from nematode worms and mice.

What seems easier to understand is that health needs to embrace the revolutions that have already come to other aspects in our lives, like banking and shopping – we are used to convenience and choice, and ever more so- so health needs to be as easy for doctors to order a blood test as it is for people to order UberEats on your phone.

I obviously have a huge interest in data and AI.  In some ways, health data is unlike other data.  For some individuals concerns about privacy are bigger when it concerns our personal medical data for example.   But our financial data is also very private too.  Shouldn’t accessing health data to help our health be as easy as accessing our banking records to help with our finances?

Health data is plentiful, especially since most data we generate in our lives will affect or relate to our health in some way.   This is gold stuff for biomarkers in ageing research. This is why Alzheimer’s Research UK initiated the Early Detection of Neurodegenerative Disease study (or EDoN) with the Gates Foundation- using digital biomarkers via smartwatch to detect diseases like Alzheimer’s years before the symptoms of dementia are evident.

Most will know that a digital biomarker is a quantifiable indicator of a person's physiological and/or behavioural state captured via any number of connected devices, including wearables (such as, smart watches, blood pressure monitors, or multi-sensor patches), implantables (like pacemakers, continuous glucose monitors), and IoT technologies (such as smart devices in the home, including voice assistants, gait monitors, and pollution sensors).

Today dementia is diagnosed when symptoms like memory loss start. To have the best chance of halting the disease, we need to intervene decades earlier, when the disease first starts to take hold. Digital biomarkers can detect and measure our mood, our memory and the way we move, sleep and interact. Subtle variations in these behaviours could provide vital clues to the presence of disease in their very earliest stage.

This is the holy grail of ageing research- to delay the ageing process and ward off dementia, indeed, maybe even find a cure.  But also to unravel the complexities of what underpins and links all chronic diseases where age is the biggest risk factor.

Thanks to AI, we are getting increasingly powerful tools to unravel these complexities.  Scientists at DeepMind and the University of Washington recently published their deep learning-based methods to analyse protein folding— the building blocks of life. We know that misfolded proteins can be devastating—causing health problems from sickle cell anaemia and cancer, to Alzheimer’s disease.

Deciphering protein folding is bound to illuminate an entire new area of biology we haven’t until now been able to study or manipulate. With these new AI tools, scientists could solve haunting medical mysteries while preparing to tackle those yet unknown. It sets the stage for better understanding our biology, new preventative health approaches, informing new medicines, and even inspiring synthetic biology down the line.

Of course, AI relies on data, and lots of it.  We know the NHS has some of the most valuable health data in the world.  This raw information has vast economic and societal potential. There’s no better proof of this than how we harnessed data to deal with the pandemic.

But raw data is not powerful on its own. It must be collected, cleaned, and curated, and of course stored and managed securely. Then it must be made available in trusted and secure platforms, to enable it to be shared and re-used.  The concept of Trusted Research Environments (or TREs) has been outlined in Ben Goldacre’s recent review (along with 180 recommendations) that has fed into the latest iteration of the NHS and Care Data Saves Lives Strategy published this month.

The idea is that for the same cost as digitising one hospital, this can be applied instead to investing in a coherent approach to data curation via TREs, and a small number of secure platforms, to unlock all the untapped potential in NHS longitudinal datasets. 

However, the NHS dataset is only a small part of the story in health, and represents the bit of our life journey when we need help, usually when we are ill.  What about the 80% of our determinants of our health that lie outside of our health and care system?   How do we collect, curate and connect this very important health relevant data, and also link it to our public sector data?

Our Future Health, led by Andy Roddam, is an important step forward.  Most of you will know that it has been set up recently to recruit 5 million healthy volunteers in a major health study which aims to predict who will get ill in their later years even before they show symptoms.  Geared to be the UK’s largest ever health study, Our Future Health will track people throughout their lives to come up with new ways to prevent, detect and treat diseases such as dementia, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and stroke.  By having such a large pool of participants researchers hope to be able to paint a picture of people’s health before they become ill and as they are diagnosed.

The private sector is already in this space of course with consumer and tech companies experimenting here. Biogen and Apple recently announced they were experimenting with how to use handsets to track cognitive function over time and identify mild cognitive impairment- similar to what Alzheimer’s Research are doing with the EDoN trial.

Apple iPhones for example, can monitor your mobility and sleep patterns now but one day soon may be able to detect early signs of mental health deterioration like depression through typing patterns and typos on your phone or tablet.

This takes health data into the realm of what is often called  ‘emotion AI’,   passively gauging how you’re feeling, using various data points, including facial expressions, to understand emotions. Already, emotion AI is being used both experimentally and commercially within cars to detect drowsy drivers like I saw at the Goodwood Need for Speed car festival on Sunday. [By the way, I though it interesting that there was a whole future lab on health at this car event.  Along with Bucattis and Ferraris were robotics, sensors and motion capture technologies being explored for future health applications- everything from mood detection, cognitive function, gait analysis to falls detection.]

The fact that big tech and now automotive technologies are getting so invested in health shows its potential from a commercial perspective.  But the value of health is far bigger than that from a societal perspective.

The global pandemic has shocked the world into realising how closely our health is linked to our wealth.  We need to see health now as a national asset to invest in to maximise societal wealth.

This means that attention from all stakeholders in health including government, public and private sector, must focus more on prevention rather than cure, far earlier in people’s lives, while addressing the wider determinants of our health and wellbeing. 

System change is needed to focus on health as an asset to invest in, not as a cost in an increasingly unsustainable healthcare system buckling under the burden of poor health driven by growing health inequalities and ageing populations.  The UK government is applying its Levelling Up policy agenda to increase healthy life expectancy and reduce health & wellbeing disparities as key pillars to drive economic growth ahead.

The health and economic fall-out from the pandemic and latest demographic trends present cities and countries with challenges, but also opportunities if we harness all the understanding of what makes people healthy and keep them healthy for as long as possible.

‘Longevity Cities’ is a strategic initiative developed by the NICA, National Innovation Centre for Ageing, and supported by the World Bank, that is rooted in the principle of 'health is the new wealth'.  

The first Longevity City is being trialled in Newcastle, and is acting as the template for cities around the world, including Milan, Tokyo, Barcelona, and Hamilton in Canada. The Longevity City template is based on two key principles: one, that shared prosperity and wellbeing needs meaningful engagement with citizens, across the generations, and two, inequalities need to be addressed.  Importantly, Longevity Cities are focused on all ages, across the lifecourse, and not limited by more traditional notions of ‘healthy ageing’ that only focus on improving old age.

The aim is to create environments that make it easy for people to follow healthier lifestyles well before old age, enabled by infrastructure, services and policies that also influence the social determinants responsible for 80% of our health.

Longevity Cities are experimenting with tools and technologies through the ‘Internet of Caring Things’, IoCT, initiative funded by NICA, North of Tyne Combined Authority and deep tech innovation organisation CPI. Local residents and 600 businesses in the region are involved.

The goal of IoCT is to work with local people and businesses to build a world-class innovation ecosystem, testing out technologies and devices on the high street, in day-to-day touchpoints – social activities like dining, shopping, walking etc.  The idea is that connected objects and cognitive systems will be designed to actively care for people, enhance their physical and mental wellbeing, by understanding and measuring their day-to-day interactions – what really matters, what people really care about, what makes them feel good.

The IoCT project will help to develop NICA’s methodology called ‘Ageing Intelligence’® - capturing and analysing data to understand human behaviour and applying consumer insights into the development of future products and services that will make it easier for people to keep healthy and well and be looked after in ways that are most meaningful to them.

For example, one of the main causes of hospitalisation for older adults is falling at home. We already have smart watches, which measure falls and call emergency numbers. However, once you fall, you have fallen. The IoCT is looking at why a person falls and how we can prevent falls in the first place through predictive technologies and alert systems. The motion capture technologies used in gaming for example, could be harnessed in falls prediction and prevention.

Going back to so-called ‘emotion AI’ the IoCT project will use technology to understand how people are feeling, and from this feeling understand if we can help them live a healthier and longer life. Machine learning can analyse data to show correlations between things that at first glance appear to be completely disconnected.   For example, is the frequency with which people do their gardening or mow the lawn an indicator of wellbeing?

For IoCT to work at scale, we need residents to engage who are also happy to share their data.  The underpinning architecture also needs to be interoperable and trustworthy.

This is what myself and colleagues have been addressing through the development of the Open Life Data Framework (OLDF), which was  published in November 2021 with the support of George Freeman, Science and Innovation Minister.  The Framework takes learnings from Open Banking,  which created an open standard to facilitate data sharing and portability between banks and which fuelled the development of a fintech ecosystem benefitting consumers.

The Open Life Data Framework aims to create the enabling conditions for public and private sectors to share data for public benefit, while ensuring public trust.

Sharing health-relevant data held within the private sector could help enhance and level-up health- key missions of the Levelling Up agenda. 

The Open Life Data Framework also supports the Government’s agile regulation agenda to create a pro-growth trusted data environment and initiatives like Smart Data, where the Government has already committed to legislate to enable schemes offering the ability for individuals to share data held by private companies with trusted third parties to help them make sense and use that data in innovative ways. 

Ultimately the Framework aims to inform interoperability standards that will support innovation and perhaps one day become the underpinning architecture to create a healthy longevity ‘scalebox’. 

IoCT can trial new technologies and mobilise data for AI in exciting areas like biomarkers in longevity research, enabling the UK to demonstrate global leadership in digital regulation with robust global standards to become the world’s tech testbed.  This all forms part of what George Freeman has been talking about in the Times over the last week to realise UK’s ambition to be a global science and tech superpower.

Really looking ahead, and maybe through funds from ARIA (the new Advanced Research Invention Agency)  for example, OLDF could underpin the development of a UK-wide Healthy Longevity Mission, becoming a core element of the government’s plans to launch  Innovation Missions incorporating the potential of AI solutions to tackle big, real-world problems in climate and health. 

Critically, the Framework can inject new thinking on health outside NHS & Care that really needs to enter the policy frame for the National AI Strategy and National Data Strategy.   

Also, too,  the newly updated Data Saves Lives NHS & Care Data Strategy, including 1)  informing fair-value commercial agreements; 2)   inputting into the value-sharing framework to support the health system in delivering good data partnerships and 3) shaping data and API infrastructure to enable wider data sharing across public and private sectors to improve personal health records and shared care records.

The Open Life Data Framework could test out key principles set out in the government’s Plan for Digital Regulation to actively promote innovation by regulating digital technologies through an outcomes-focused approach, supported by robust evidence. 

The Framework could underpin NICA’s Internet of Caring Things and other exemplars to become part of a series of  ‘Living Labs’, that are currently being trialled in the energy sector, to provide a real world setting for the testing of new products, providing a clear evidence-based approach, and allowing for the testing of innovative technology in a controlled environment, and, crucially, yielding outcomes data  to show how co-creation and engagement with industry, consumers and citizens builds trust - which is the most important output of effective digital regulation.

From an international perspective, these Healthy Longevity Living Labs could evolve into cross-border sandboxes evolving into a global network of Longevity Cities to improve the ease of doing business and the sharing of innovative tech with international trading partners.

The Data Framework also provides the underpinning mechanism to help employers, businesses and investors in their role to improve health and reduce health & wellbeing disparities in Levelling Up plans.

This is the focus of my work at Business for Health (B4H)- and we are working with the Confederation of Business Industry (CBI) to develop the Business for Health Index, which has the support of Chris Whitty our CMO and funding from the Health Foundation.

The Business for Health Index is aligned to the ONS Health Index and is intended to measure the positive and negative health impacts of employers, businesses and investors in three key areas: 1) direct impact on employee health; 2) secondary impacts via products and services and 3) contribution to community and societal resilience. 

We are developing the methodology and metrics to incentivise and measure business contribution to increases in healthy life expectancy and reductions in health and wellbeing disparities- goals enshrined in the Levelling Up policy plans. 

We are taking a steer what has guided the climate change agenda and net zero targets with the ambition to bring “Health” into ESG-driven investment, that is, “ESHG”.

An ESHG framework focussed on equitable health outcomes will help the business and investor community drive positive change and impact as part of Healthy Longevity Innovation Mission, through long-term strategic projects that reduce the risk factors that can damage health, like unhealthy food, poor work, pollution, and poor housing, and are incentivised and measured by their impact on positive health and wellbeing outcomes. 

A significant opportunity exists to leverage institutional capital and pension funds with more zeal, especially with new freedoms in the pipeline for pensions funds (that George Freeman has been talking about) to invest in higher-risk innovation areas and which could be incentivised through ESHG investment approaches. 

At a recent Bidwells event on how to help UK become a science superpower, someone remarked that combining the top 8 Local Authority pension funds ​​in the UK, for example, adds up to £328 billion and these pension funds are searching for ESG-led investment projects in net zero, levelling up and sustainability.  Local Authorities control planning consent and are responsible for delivering net zero and sustainability/ESG, yet no-one is presenting investible proposals to them.  

This presents a significant opportunity- why not create ESHG funds for matching long-term patient capital into these strategic projects in the Healthy Longevity Innovation Mission, such as Longevity Cities and IoCT enabled by regulatory reform and data infrastructure and standards crucial to help the UK become a science superpower? 

In closing, my message again is we must have a greater focus on prevention to reduce demand on the NHS and care system.   A greater focus on the 80% of the determinants of health that lie outside our health and care system is needed to drive system change for sustainable health and prevention.  

The goal of society should be to maximise health measures, not just economics measures, to benefit everyone. Tackling health inequalities between people and places, and the wider socio-economic and structural inequalities that drive them is therefore central and requires a whole systems approach involving multiple interventions.

As part of this, it is about harnessing the developments we are seeing in longevity science and data innovation to maximise access to healthier longer lives to everyone. Insights from genetics, biological, behavioural, environmental and financial data are currently under-utilised and there are significant opportunities to use AI and multimodal learning to predict disease and incentivise healthier living through harnessing such ‘life’ data.

Technologies like AI will continue to converge countless areas of research across the life course.  Better use of public data and private data combined with digital tools and an understanding of wider determinants of health will give us the ability to better identify risks and help the people most in need, before they become patients.  We need to harness scientific innovation and collaboration and leapfrog old models of healthcare with new ones that achieve healthy longevity for all.

Disruption – a word we find so often buzzing around in the media, that we are starting to melt away its true meaning. So what does it now mean to truly be disruptive? Various attempts to define, dissect and discuss disruption were made at the recent Disruption Summit this month, which aimed to bring together leading ‘disruptive’ companies to explore cutting-edge ideas and enlightening perspectives. The day kicked off with a fascinating talk by Frazer Bennett who discussed ingenuity and the growing importance of an experimental mindset. Bennett considered how the younger generation has now developed an ‘inquisitive restlessness’, as millennials constantly engage and interpret an unprecedented amount of information. In the working world, we are witnessing a beguiling shift away from financial benefits to personal fulfilment benefits; with over a third of millennials now choosing culture and purpose over salary and monetary bonuses.

Whether we are now breeding commendable philanthropists or disillusioned idealists is questionable but we still must ensure that the younger generations are expending their fiery energy in the best possible way. Bennett argues that the experimental mindset is essential to positive disruption, and this ‘experimental’ mindset must put failure aside and prioritise innovation and constant invention. People too often reject ideas, worrying that they won’t ‘scale’ or prove profitable, yet too often scaling is a barrier to development. You need to therefore instead find your purpose, adopt an experimental mentality and then ignore the lingering worries of failure – only from then onwards will your positive ‘disruption’ ensue.

While this concept of ignoring failure and encouraging experimental attitudes appears refreshing and fruitful, there are societal constraints notably in education which inevitably hold it back. In an intriguing panel by inspiring young entrepreneurs, Alexis Monks, Paul Frampton, Rupa Ganatra, Nicholas Shekerdemian and Jack Parsons, they highlight that the current education system does not enable entrepreneurship and disruption. This is exemplified by The Telegraph who highlight that children currently speak for just 20 seconds in lessons, demonstrating no time for questioning, discussing or generating ‘disruptive’ debate.

Ideally, this needs to change as the digital economy requires young people to be entrepreneurs and pioneers, yet the education system currently does not facilitate this. While disruption in lessons was once a habit of class hooligans, it can now be initiated by those engaging with debates; those who envision themselves as thought-leaders and innovators of the future. One of the best ways to ensure creativity is through face to face communication, and now that we live in a world of constantly buzzing emails and mobile phones, this is becoming a dying art. Rupa Ganatra argues that she has no internal emails in her company in order to encourage her employees to actively engage with one another and argues that her productivity and sense of community has consequently surged.

With the shifts of many mechanistic jobs becoming automated, social skills and the ability to think out the box have never been more essential. The education system therefore needs to effectively bridge the gap between education and industry,  raising children’s heads from their books and engaging them in the fast-paced world that surrounds them. In order to create an inspired, inventive and entrepreneurial future generation, we need to ensure a productive infrastructure, creative exploration and disruptive debate.

Overall the Disruption Summit demonstrates a mere taster into the emerging and enthusing companies that are disrupting traditional services across the globe. With a surging population, growing environmental pressures and an economy existing within turbulent political intervals, companies that can disrupt the status quo and inject original solutions are more essential now than ever.

Jasmine Eskenzi, Communications and Ecosystem Manager, Collider Health

While half the world’s population is female, and most health decisions are carried out by women, only 9% of health tech businesses are founded by women, just 9% of investment into UK start-ups goes to female founders, and a mere 17% of the UK technology sector is female. 

Why is this?  There are many reasons but they all start early in a woman’s life.  A recent report, Girls in STEM,  by Accenture highlighted how from a very young age girls are all too often persuaded to believe that, in certain subjects, their abilities are defined by their gender.   The report showed that more than four out of five parents (82%) and teachers (88%) agree that there is unconscious gender stereotyping and bias when it comes to STEM subjects and careers. More than half of both parents (52%) and teachers (57%) admit to having personally made subconscious stereotypes about girls and boys. The report concluded it is up to all of us, parents, teachers, politicians or leaders of industry, to change these misconceptions, to stoke girls’ natural curiosity and show them that the STEM disciplines are full of exciting and genuinely fulfilling possibilities.

The gender issues in STEM education are a major contributor to the problems with diversity that currently exist in the global technology sector, with serious economic and societal consequences.   New technology could have a disproportionately greater negative impact on women concerning jobs, and men currently dominate in Artificial Intelligence and other digital disruptors – with the risk that traditional biases guide the algorithms that will be at the heart of future products and services.

The danger of biases entering algorithms was cited by Google’s AI chief John Giannandrea recently as his biggest fear- not Elon Musk’s fear of super-intelligent killer robots.  Google has been criticised too for their part in perpetuating gender biases in their own company culture- one of the biggest stories in tech this year was the internal memo sent by Google engineer James Damore, who was fired from the company after writing that there are biological differences to blame for the lack of women in tech. 

I have had the pleasure of working with Maja Pantic, Professor of Behavioural Computing at Imperial College, in her national campaign to address these issues by encouraging more women to study computer science.  We had hundreds of teenage girls and their parents and teachers come to the launch event and hear inspirational role models like Saadia Zahidi, Head of Education, Gender and Work of World Economic Forum, Dr Sharon Goldwater, University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, Dr Sabine Hauert, Lecturer in Robotics, University of Bristol, Dr Holly Cummins, Technical Lead, IBM Bluemix Garage, and Maxine Mackintosh, Co-founder of One HealthTech.  There were many takeaways from the event, but one key message was that girls needed more hands-on experience and exposure to the range of careers that STEM offers them, in terms that resonate with them-like creativity, problem solving and social impact.

But what about the support that is needed for those women who do follow STEM careers? Getting attention in a male dominated investor community is a particular challenge.   A recent Tech Crunch study – CrunchBase Women In Venture – revealed that female owned companies were only receiving 10% of global venture capital funds despite delivering strong returns, with the majority of funding directed at male-led businesses. In March 2017, Fortune reported that for each women-led company that received venture capital funding in 2016, 16 other male-led companies got cash. 

A recent story illustrates the sexism that exists and the ingenuity women have to use to get around this.    Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer, co-founders of e-commerce site Witchsy, invented “Keith Mann,” a fake male cofounder, which, depressingly, worked to kick down doors that had previously been closed to them.  “Kevin” got faster and more polite responses than the female co-founders, and essentially gave the company immediate authority around other men.

The takeaway is clear: It’s harder for women to get ahead in a start-up world with odds stacked against them- and they must take things into their own hands to get ahead.  This is why it is encouraging to see such initiatives as Allbright, which has a ‘first of its kind’ funding platform aimed at female entrepreneurs to tackle the funding gap between female-led and male-led business in the UK, and more recently, Blooms, London's first business club for female founders and entrepreneurs, set up by Lu Li who is also behind Blooming Founders, a community aiming to break down the barriers that hold female entrepreneurs back.

Every step, large or small is important.  And that’s why I am extremely excited to be working with AXA on their new ‘Women in Health Tech’ category of the 2018 AXA Health Tech & You Awards.  The category aims to support women who are changing the way people think about their health and how to care for others. Working with AXA and great women leaders, like Julie Bretland of Our Mobile Health, and Angela Maragna, Indra Joshi and Maxine Mackintosh of One HealthTech and Marija Butkovic at Women of Wearables, we are all doing our bit to help women pioneers in health technology.

We all need to support gender diversity- men and women. The pay-off will be huge to society in ethical terms but also economically- a recent McKinsey Global Institute report found that if women play an identical role in labour markets to that of men, as much $28 trillion or 26% could be added to global annual GDP by 2025.

Many people do not feel in charge of their health and expect others to manage it for them when things go wrong.  But more and more of us are starting to use our biologic, physiologic and behavioural data to understand what could help us lead healthier and happier lives.  Wearables are becoming more sophisticated,  like Apple Watch and soonFitbit’s smartwatch armed with biometric sensors that help people track their health using data, and such  portals like Patients Know Best (PKB)  allow patients to access their medical records online and share with their doctors.

These tools are accumulating an impressive user and evidence base showing that putting people in charge of their health works, and costs the NHS less too.  Yet while we are generating vast amounts of data through our phones and wearables, it has helped to create fortunes for some of the most valuable and profitable companies in the world: Google, Apple, Facebookand Amazon.  This has led to concerns about their excessive power, which surface occasionally in controversies like the ‘legally inappropriate use’ of NHS data in the Royal Free Hospital by Google DeepMind and how psychometric big data mined from Facebook pushed Britain into Brexit and Trump into America.

Very soon, however, this ‘data power’ is about to shift to the individual with a new EU directive, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into force in May 2018, that will legally oblige companies to ensure all personal data they hold is secure and private, and has been consented to BEORE any data is collected.   Organisations found in non-compliance will face heavy fines: €20 million or 4 percent of global revenue per infraction. This could mean millions, or even billions of dollars in fines for large companies, and huge reputational damage too-   yet only 30% of UK businesses are currently preparing for it (according to a report conducted by YouGov and commissioned by law firm Irwin Mitchell in May 2017).

Shouldn’t businesses be more attuned to what may happen when normal citizens begin to realise the value and power of their data?  While incumbent businesses slumber, there is a growing number of start-ups emerging that realiseonce people get financially rewarded for their data they will take a greater interest in controlling it- start-ups like People.io, a European start-up that is giving people ownership of their data through a ‘firewall for people’; Meeco, a life management platform or ‘API of Me’; and Consentua  a new consent management API and service,  giving people choice and control over how their personal data is used.

Last week saw the launch of the report, Unleashing the Potential of Health and Care Data, byFuture Care Capital, which sets out how the UK can become a global leader in harnessing the power of data and emergent technology to transform health and care outcomes. However, this utopian vision of a data-driven health economy depends on citizens taking control of their data and Government committing to safeguard their privacy through a commitment to world class data ethics.

Technological developments underway will help citizens control and exchange their data, especially blockchain technology.  Blockchain is based on the concept of a distributed ledger database, which ensures trust, transparency and security of data in a way that many predict will completely disrupt the internet, change how we work and create a more equal society in years to come.

Whatever the grand predictions, blockchain has huge potential to ensure that it is not just companies but individuals who can get real value from their personal data.  Blockchain allows people to decide who sees their medical records and puts them in control with what data they share with whom and what action they want to take- for example, sharing their genomic data with a doctor who can help them assess their risk of a particular condition.  Because blockchain is so secure, people will become more comfortable with sharing their data across the healthcare ecosystem and this could also yield hugely important insight to improve health at a population level- and this in turn could drive more effective, preventative care. Citizens, as the gatekeepers of their own data, could be incentivised to share it with pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms who could then use the insight from this data to develop better drugs, more quickly, at lower cost and reward people for healthier lifestyles.  

Estonia is leading the way in the blockchain revolution already.  Its Patient Portal gives citizens access to medical documents, referral responses, prescriptions, and insurance information. Individuals can also use the Portal to declare their intentions regarding blood transfusions and organ donation.  In 2015, over 80,000 medical certificates were forwarded electronically to its Road Administration Agency to facilitate driving licence renewals.

The effect on individual empowerment and on medical transparency is transformative and  is shedding light on how a new collaborative health economy could unfold-   where people are in control- enabling individuals and organisations to transact directly amongst each other, while reducing the power of gatekeepers and using data for wider societal good.

Get ready!

Tina Woods is a health contributor to D/SRUPTION Magazine where this article first appeared.

The Disruption Summit held on 5th September was a great festival of ideas with people across the spectrum of retail, manufacturing, health, financial services, cars, homes, and education brought into a vortex of discussion on how AI, VR, AR, blockchain and other technologies would change their worlds. There were chants of ‘purpose’ over ‘profit’, ‘why’ over ‘what’ and ‘cause’ over ‘cash’.

The message was clear- uncertainty is the new normal and preparedness the new mindset to survive.  Business leaders need to get used to conducting business where ’doing’ is more important than ‘thinking’.   J C Oliver from Unlockd talked about passion trumping knowledge (‘doing the Donald’) and the need to disrupt ourselves.

And business leaders do need to disrupt themselves before they can change mindsets in their organisations.  In a world characterized by increasing complexity and uncertainty some business leaders in big companies have responded by layering yet more bureaucracy- who else but senior executives is going to address all those vexing new issues, like globalisation, digitisation, diversity and sustainability? This mindset has produced a surge in new C-level roles: Chief Analytics Officer, Chief Collaboration Officer, Chief Ethics Officer, and even Chief Happiness Officer.

But we have got to invent new paradigms.  We don’t need all these new C suite executives when companies need to get flatter and smaller and more ‘distributed’.  At a time where data and information abounds, citizens want more control over their lives, more transparency and trust.  It is clear that young people want different things in life- aspiring to do things on their terms. 

Blockchain enthusiast swear by the new ‘Community Token Economy’ coming soon to help create new digital economies (see Outlier Venture’s excellent white paper here) that  will redistribute power and wealth- and give power back to the people without the need for big corporations and their C Suite armies paying consultants and agencies telling us what to think and do.

Blockchain is now being promoted by the United Nations as a promising tool to start solving the world’s greatest problems- in democratising access to energy, aid, land, voting and healthcare.  The ID2020 Alliance—a new organization composed of UN agencies, non-profits, companies, governments, and other enterprises—isbuilding a digital ID network that would make identity personal, persistent, portable, and private. That is, it would be unique to only one person, live with a person from life to death, be accessible from anywhere, and could only be given out with permission.

Blockchain can be sued to trade any digital asset.  In the session I chaired at DISRUPTION Summit on new thinking in data powered health, we talked about data as the ‘new oil’ – the new oil that is making some companies very rich, but which we all have a stake and claim to as the world’s largest resource to change our lives for the better.   Hot on the heels of Sir John Bell’s report on the UK life sciences industrial strategy, which highlighted a very urgent need to review how companies are given access to NHS data (belonging to the British tax-paying public), we looked at how we can give power to people by giving them control over how they share their data.   We asked the question, what will happen when the normal consumer, begins to realise the value and power of their data?  Nic Oliver, CEO of People.io, does a great job at persuading us that we need to take back control (and earn money from our data that we are currently giving away for free) at a time when unfolding technologies such as blockchain and the new GDPR data regulations (coming into force in 2018) will put the citizen at the centre of data ownership.

Following the Summit, we are now convening major stakeholders across policy, technology, health and social care to look at how we can use data to improve health and care, exploring opportunities for creating data cooperatives to accelerate innovation and adoption of new technology with reference to the ‘British Data Exchange’ model, and taking learnings from other examples and other industries, especially banking. 

Please contact me on tina.woods@colliderhealth.com if you would like to get involved in this programme and other developments exploring how personal information could be traded for social good in a citizen-driven data value exchange.  The opportunities for health and care are enormous but also for the future of society.