Gary Hawkins, CART
The massive food and healthcare industries in the United States are largely disconnected, though they touch nearly every consumer every day. Imagine the person who goes to the doctor and receives a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes, given a prescription for Metformin, and told to exercise and watch their diet. Returning home, the same person finds a mailer from their local supermarket with special prices on soft drink, ice cream, and potato chips. This concerning scenario and similar others play out every day for millions of Americans.
The result of this institutional schizophrenia? Exploding healthcare costs and poor health conditions for millions of people. The Milliman Research Report 2017 states that annual medical costs for a family of four will be $26,944 this year. For the first time in over 20 years life expectancy in America has declined. The bottom line is that healthcare costs are no longer sustainable at the individual, business, or government level. Something must give.
Technology is powering a new paradigm in which healthcare and food are merged together to improve the human condition: Personalized wellness. Personalized wellness bridges the chasm by leveraging nutrition science, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and consumer technology to guide each person to foods and products beneficial to their individual health condition and aligns food manufacturers, retailers, employers, and managed care organizations to a singular focus: Improving and maintaining the well being of the individual.
It is only now that the data and the technologies are available to create the personalized wellness paradigm envisioned here. Deconstructing nutrition information to countless data attributes enables powerful linkage between health conditions and the hundreds of thousands of food products available across the United States. The ability to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to personalize, at a product level, food recommendations that are beneficial to each individual is only recently available. And what makes it all work is the ability to convey personalized food guidance to the individual via the smartphone in hand while in the store aisle.
“Food is the area consumers really want to deal with the most,” states Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, health economist for Think Health. “Nobody really wants to take medicine. People would rather project-manage health through food as prescription. A recent meeting with a physician group highlighted the shortcomings of efforts to date as doctors explained patients forget nearly everything within 24 hours of leaving the office.
Perhaps what is most powerful about the personalized wellness vision is that everyone across the food-healthcare supply chain benefits from improved outcomes and quality of life for the individual. Retailers gain stronger customer relationships as they come to be viewed as true partners in wellness and consumer goods brand manufacturers have a path to redemption from the processed foods abyss.
Employers and managed care organizations who shoulder a substantial portion of healthcare cost finally have an ability to link improved eating to performance based measures, providing the foundation for meaningful incentives to encourage the sought-after healthy behavior.
The vision of a new model joining together the massive healthcare and food industries is powerful. The data and the technology needed to make personalized wellness a reality are available today. Participants across the food-health supply chain - managed care organizations, employers, providers, food manufacturers and retailers - are already coalescing around the personalized wellness vision, bringing it to life and improving the human condition.
+MORE
