According to Andrew Lacy, founder and CEO of Prenuvo, there's no such thing as too much information when it comes to understanding the spectrum of your health and well-being. After all, he's in the biometrics business. Prenuvo offers whole-body MRI scans designed to detect early markers of diseases such as cancer and aneurysms.
During a panel discussion Tuesday at Fortune's Brainstorm Health Conference in Dana Point, Calif., Lacey pushed back against the notion of data overwhelm.
“The average person literally has no information about their health,” he says, and that's where preventive medicine comes into play.
“The challenge we face as a health care system is that we are taught that we are normal until we are diagnosed with a sudden and advanced disease, such as cancer or a chronic disease,” he said. “At that point, our health declines rapidly and we end up spending a lot of money trying to keep people alive in poor health.”
But Lacey stressed that diseases like cancer don't appear overnight. Over time, the infection becomes suppurative, but is often unnoticed by the host. But it doesn't have to be that way.
“The starting point here is to give people a comprehensive inside look, and only through that can we really understand what we can do as individuals to extend our healthspan and lifespan. “We can do that,” he said. “To be honest, I don't think we're even close to the problem of too much data. I think the problem is not enough data.”
Alexa Mikhail, senior health and wellness reporter at Fortune, moderated a panel featuring Lacey; Daisy Robinton, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Oviva Therapeutics; and Alina Su, co-founder and CEO of Generation Lab.
“What we're trying to do, the people who are on this stage, is really bring accessibility and knowledge and power to the audience,” Sue said. This should be a right for everyone, not just for doctors. ”
However, our ability to interpret biomedical data is only as good as the corresponding body of research available, which Robinton noted has historically failed to include women and people of color. .
“We have ambitions for how these data can inform personal choices and give us agency in doing so, but the quality of that data and its diversity will help us are very severely restricted,” Robinton said. “In today's health care system, but even at the individual level, the averages we use to guide clinical decision-making are often based on what is actually normal on that bell curve and the context behind it. You're really limited by your ability to understand what you're bringing.
Robinton continued, “Over the next five to 10 years, we will continue to reshape the data landscape to inform how we actually understand human health and how we make decisions based on that new understanding. We will see many changes that will help,” he added.
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