Today’s preventive health practices draw deeply from the proverb that proclaims, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Preventive health seeks better overall outcomes by encouraging an approach to healthcare that is proactive rather than reactive.
A wide range of common health practices, from proper nutrition to cancer screenings, all fall under the banner of preventive health. “Preventive health is about investing in your health throughout your entire life, and not just when sickness strikes,” says Mark Urdahl, Chairman and CEO of the Young Blood Institute.
The Young Blood Institute is a non-profit clinical research organization established to explore and promote the preventive health potential of therapeutic plasma exchange. Its goal is to provide private care clinics across the country with access to preventive health tools that leverage the latest medical findings and technology.
“By harnessing innovation to empower individuals with better information and care, we maximize the impact of preventive health,” Urdahl adds. “We live in an age where the tools exist to dramatically increase the benefits of preventive health, but what we need in the medical community is a greater willingness to embrace and employ these new tools, which can lead to a new, more advanced standard of care.”
Using Technology to Empower Early Detection
Strengthening the body to ward off disease and injury is a central tenet of preventive health. Regular exercise and immunization are some examples of practices that contribute to this goal.
However, some damaging health conditions can manifest regardless of the individual’s health. In those cases, early detection is a tool that can prevent patients from experiencing the full extent of a disease or other health condition. Early detection provides the opportunity for the proper treatment to impede, and sometimes reverse, the effects of a disease.
In today’s healthcare landscape, technology has emerged as a key player in early detection efforts. Yet experts believe even more can be done to enhance technology’s impact in that area.
“We can utilize technology to enhance preventative healthcare by first incorporating more advanced diagnostics earlier in our lives to detect disease before primary symptoms present themselves,” Urdahl explains. “For example, a simple blood test can now detect amyloid beta, the precursor protein responsible for Alzheimer’s disease.”
According to the US National Institute on Aging, plaques resulting from amyloid beta (Aβ) begin accumulating in the human brain decades before outward symptoms of Alzheimer’s appear. Early detection of the plaques empowers early responses with the potential to prevent or reduce the cognitive decline that Alzheimer’s patients experience.
“Early detection makes early therapeutic intervention possible, potentially minimizing serious consequences and reducing the level of harm from a given disease pathology,” Urdahl says. “When blood tests show the potential for Alzheimer’s, for example, early interventions for the disease such as therapeutic plasma exchange can be prescribed to stop Aβ development and, thus, prevent cognitive impairment from Alzheimer’s disease.”
Promoting Preventive Health with Economic Incentives
In modern business, innovative products and methodologies rapidly gain acceptance, so much so that the quick embrace of innovative new technology is seen as a hallmark of top-performing organizations. In the realm of modern medicine, however, the same is not true.
“Currently, our medical establishment takes too long to adopt new and promising medical technology,” Urdahl says. “The same unfortunate problem exists with simply identifying and approving new uses or indications for existing medical technologies.”
A number of factors are typically cited as contributing to the slow pace of innovation in today’s medical space. Extensive testing and trials are often required before treatments can be deemed truly effective. Additionally, the efforts required to obtain, maintain, and operate the new equipment needed to perform innovative treatments are often seen as prohibitive.
In most cases, according to Urdahl, the challenges come down to economics, which leads experts to believe that a new approach to incentivizing innovation is needed.
“Economic incentives for new diagnostics and therapies could significantly improve the situation, affecting behavioral changes that democratize much-needed medical treatments,” Urdahl argues. “For example, the FDA approved therapeutic plasma exchange many decades ago as a treatment for autoimmune disease and certain neurological disorders — a decision which eventually led to insurance covering the use of the therapy for those disorders — but insurance does not cover the same exact treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Extending insurance reimbursements to a wider range of applications could help millions of people gain access to proven new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.”
Modern innovations in the medical arena have the potential to elevate preventive health care to the next level. To realize that potential, the medical community must be willing to extend the economic incentives that empower the full utilization of technological tools.
