As Vanguard’s principal, Ken Banta, notes at the start of this conversation, “healthcare is widely seen as being broken here in the U.S.”

Ken is speaking with Andrew Thompson, Managing Director and co-founder of the venture capital firm Spring Ridge Ventures and also, until recently, CEO of Proteus Digital Health. Andrew argues that we and other countries don’t have healthcare systems at all, but rather 20th-century “sick care” systems, well suited to handling acute diseases and trauma, but not the chronic diseases that are now our biggest health issues.

Proteus, a unicorn company that Andrew cofounded and ran for 17 years, set out to change that with the knowledge-amplifying, consumer-empowering tools of digital tech. In a nine-month controlled study, the company found utilization of hospital services reduced by over 90 percent among patients whose providers used its information-flow technology.

The only hitch: The hospital system, as now constituted, can’t afford that kind of reduction. In Andrew’s view, the transformation that the system needs “won’t happen because people in sick care want to do it. It will happen because we create a new system with new sets of financial resources and incentives that make that possible.”

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