Health care should be a team sport

I want to share some personal friends and stories with you that I've actually never talked about in public before to help illustrate the idea and the need and the hope for us to reinvent our health care system around the world. Twenty-four years ago, I had — a sophomore in college, I had a series of fainting spells. No alcohol was involved. And I ended up in student health, and they ran some labwork and came back right away, and said, "Kidney problems." And before I knew it, I was involved and thrown into this six months of tests and trials and tribulations with six doctors across two hospitals in this clash of medical titans to figure out which one of them was right about what was wrong with me. And I'm sitting in a waiting room some time later for an ultrasound, and all six of these doctors actually show up in the room at once, and I'm like, "Uh oh, this is bad news." And their diagnosis was this: They said, "You have two rare kidney diseases that are going to actually destroy your kidneys eventually, you have cancer-like cells in your immune system that we need to start treatment right away, and you'll never be eligible for a kidney transplant, and you're not likely to live more than two or three years."

Now, with the gravity of this doomsday diagnosis, it just sucked me in immediately, as if I began preparing myself as a patient to die according to the schedule that they had just given to me, until I met a patient named Verna in a waiting room, who became a dear friend, and she grabbed me one day and took me off to the medical library and did a bunch of research on these diagnoses and these diseases, and said, "Eric, these people who get this are normally in their '70s and '80s. They don't know anything about you. Wake up. Take control of your health and get on with your life." And I did.

Now, these people making these proclamations to me were not bad people. In fact, these professionals were miracle workers, but they're working in a flawed, expensive system that's set up the wrong way. It's dependent on hospitals and clinics for our every care need. It's dependent on specialists who just look at parts of us. It's dependent on guesswork of diagnoses and drug cocktails, and so something either works or you die. And it's dependent on passive patients who just take it and don't ask any questions.

Now the problem with this model is that it's unsustainable globally. It's unaffordable globally. We need to invent what I call a personal health system. So what does this personal health system look like, and what new technologies and roles is it going to entail?

Now, I'm going to start by actually sharing with you a new friend of mine, Libby, somebody I've become quite attached to over the last six months. This is Libby, or actually, this is an ultrasound image of Libby. This is the kidney transplant I was never supposed to have. Now, this is an image that we shot a couple of weeks ago for today, and you'll notice, on the edge of this image, there's some dark spots there, which was really concerning to me. So we're going to actually do a live exam to sort of see how Libby's doing. This is not a wardrobe malfunction. I have to take my belt off here. Don't you in the front row worry or anything. (Laughter) I'm going to use a device from a company called Mobisante. This is a portable ultrasound. It can plug into a smartphone. It can plug into a tablet. Mobisante is up in Redmond, Washington, and they kindly trained me to actually do this on myself. They're not approved to do this.