According to Los Angeles's wealthiest man, now that healthcare has been overhauled, it's time to give medical care a major reboot. Chairman of the California company NantHealth and a physician-entrepreneur, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, in order to transform the way medicine is practiced and medical care is delivered across the nation, he has unveiled a pilot program that will do just that.
For years after diagnosis, the key goal is to make deadly cancers a condition that patients can survive and manage and this is among the collaborative efforts. On Wednesday, Soon-Shiong outlined his test-bed for a new model of medical care; a system that lashes together genomic processing, supercomputing, high-speed data networks and the same mobile devices that people use to make dinner reservations.
At a Washington, D.C., conference put on by the Bipartisan Policy Center and a not-for-profit called Doctors Helping Doctors he said that all of this technology will put the best information available in the hands of doctors instantly.
He added that a system of secure, cloud-based information-sharing has been devised by NantHealth together with Blue Shield of California, Verizon and AT&T that promises to put genomic analyses of patients' cancers in their physician's hands in 47 seconds.
While such gene screens have become ever cheaper and more widely available, they're not yet fast. To perform and transmit, they can take eight weeks in some cases. To cancer patients whose treatments rely on them, that's a potentially costly delay. In the effort, which has been roughly seven years in the making, almost $500 million has so far been invested.
Building a $3-million continuous learning center, Blue Shield of California will implement the pilot program with Saint John's Health Center, a 270-bed hospital in Santa Monica. To the hospital, Soon-Shiong's foundation has donated $135 million. Across the state, where it has some 3.3 million customers, the insurer's aim is to extend the program.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
