If you are fortunate enough not to have had a run-in with healthcare – and thus your health – you will know someone who has. Is this really the best we can do?

There isn’t much point in denigrating healthcare from a service and delivery perspective: those within “the system” are as much at the mercy of it, perhaps more so, than the rest of us. At the same time, we also don’t see a lot of point in trying to move the needle (ultimately improve patient outcomes) within the current system. It needs a rebuild, from the ground up.

Why such a drastic approach?

Precisely because it’s within the current system. Whether that’s a nationalised system, or a system predicated on an increasingly specious insurance industry, we believe it’s actually the paradigm beneath the system that needs to change.

While existing disruptors are attempting to tear through systems that don’t work, there’s a parallel phenomenon at play: the paradigm of medicine 3.0, where prevention and proactivity comes through smart healthcare and technology, and the notion that the thing that matters is education.

In other words, health is becoming something that doesn’t simply happen to people, but that they can themselves manage, think about, and even control – from birth, or before.

The success of this paradigm will hinge on motivation. If people are not motivated, education and the supposed impact – ‘should ultra-processed food be labelled like cigarettes?’; ‘How do I stop my child from getting microplastics in his blood?’ – are a non-starter.

At Basis we see the future of health as inextricably tied to technologies that augment the individual, and technologies that enable individuals to augment themselves.

Rather than consider change at the level of incremental process improvement (sourcing, screening and onboarding agency workers for the NHS) or employing nudge theory (apps to incentivise fewer sugary drinks to kids, or whole-family exercise), the focus for us is on enabling and supporting people to hack themselves into 3.0. For example, access to and utilisation of technologies such as Neuralink to quell cravings or interrupt depressive episodes – to improve and lengthen life, good life.

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This is also why we believe health must be distributed: provided by myriad providers that treat individuals as patients and customers, with providers that can provide holistic “glue” as part of that. The Sand Clinic explains($) how its approach will emulate the ‘Tesla model’, ensuring access to all. We’re excited about models that can distribute outcomes widely, even if it will take time to get us there.

Relying on government to get us to a version of personalised health fit for the twenty-first century won’t cut it, for two primary reasons.

First, we must ensure consistently high standards – and that requires competition. Since the Second World War, and the subsequent boot up of uncharted centralisation, we’ve become afraid of competition. Many of us have no idea what an alternative to the status quo could look like. But, even if you think what we currently have is passable (or even good), we have to remember that demand for these services will only continue to rise. If you live in a country where the government controls the money supply (and seemingly has an insatiable appetite for printing the stuff), all services, especially its own, will continue to rise in cost – because it both pays for and taxes workers. We have to compete to innovate and counter that trajectory.

Second, what we are describing above (and are expecting to happen regardless), is too important to leave in the hands of bureaucrats: it must be in the hands of people themselves. Using technology powerful enough to change who you are, to change your life, must be opt-in.

At Basis, we’re deploying capital in this direction to help us get there faster. Some particular areas of focus for us are:

Primarily

• “Thought Tech” – anything that helps you “cyborg” your way to healthspan
• Full-stack ‘Tesla’ health models – the sooner there are more of these, the sooner they become accessible
• New models to underpin these. We’ll write more on this but we do not believe insurance models work, and would like to see smart mutual models and financial instruments come to market to support individuals to look after their health.

Secondarily

• Proven educative tools geared towards the two biggest killers: heart disease and cancer
• We consider metabolic chaos as part of this (e.g. obesity) Drugs and software focused on bacteriology and virology