The Economist’s Digital Editor predicts Wearables will kill the Healthcare Insurance industry

The Economist’s Digital Editor predicts Wearables will kill the Healthcare Insurance industry

mhealthinsight.com – “…(17min) data meets healthcare: the chart in the background is cost per genome. So the sequencing of the first human genome took a decade and cost $3 Billion and you can now do it for a $1,000 in slightly less than 48 hours and this is an improvement in price/performance that is much faster than Moore’s Law… …this means that genomics, whole genomic comparison that the NHS is currently doing this program to sequence 100,000 people and then you can start to work out which genes correlate with diseases and so on, the problem is it used to be the sequencing that was the hard bit and it’s now actually the data analysis because the computers aren’t really keeping up it’s pretty hard but the tools are improving and this allows you to do some very interesting things, it allows you to have digital healthcare. It allows you to start to try to work out what the causes and effects really are and when you throw in data from wearable devices like the Apple Watch and other things there are all sorts of interesting new things that you can do. You can start to identify which diseases people are likely to be susceptible to, have them look out for particular symptoms, You can pre-empt and basically treat people and keep them well rather than waiting for something to go wrong which is much much more expensive. This is all great but it threatens quite a lot of existing ways of…