In this talk, Deb Kilpatrick frames the current era as the Digital Age, where data is the core asset and, uniquely, individuals own the raw material. She draws a historical parallel to the Agricultural and Industrial Ages, highlighting how ownership shifted from land to iron to data. Kilpatrick explains how this shift underpins a radical transformation in healthcare, arguing that populations of individuals—each continuously generating health data they control—can become the foundational platform for new health solutions. She references Alec Ross’s book on the digital economy, outlines the long‑standing evidence‑based medicine framework in the U.S., and points out that while patients have contributed data for decades, they have not owned or directed its use. Kilpatrick asserts that we have now reached a critical mass of consumer‑driven health data, driven by the ubiquity of mobile devices and a surge in health‑related Google searches (e.g., “healthcare near me”). This convergence creates an opportunity for companies like Evidation to wire up a new ecosystem where individuals permission their data for research, care, and product development, fundamentally redefining how healthcare is delivered and financed.
Chapters
You had the Agricultural Age, you had the Industrial Age, and now the Digital Age. And if you look at the core asset of each of those ages— Agricultural Age, core asset is land. Industrial Age, core asset was iron. Digital Age, core asset is data. And now you have to look at who owns the raw materials, who owns the core asset. But here we are in the Digital Age, individuals own the raw materials. So enter the digital era of medicine. How many of you have ever read this book? Any of you that are interested in healthcare should read it. Go buy it, download it, read it on your Kindle, whatever, read it on your iBooks. So Alec Ross was, he was sort of the CIO to Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State. Now, if you ever hear him speak and he says that, he'll quickly say, it wasn't my fault about the email server. That's the first thing he'll say. I heard Alec Ross speak a few years ago at the Rosewood, right around the time that he was releasing this book. And I was pretty blown away by it. I am not a person— remember, point one of my bio was the only things I religiously read are Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. That means I don't really read a lot of New York Times bestsellers. So, for me to hear this guy speak and go get this book and read it was like kind of transformational for me. But I agreed with so much of what I heard him speak about, about why the era of digital and information that we're in is so important to the way that economies will work in the future, that I was just really blown away by the idea that healthcare in particular would be really, truly transformed by this. And now this is several years ago. And so I've kind of summarized what I heard him say, what I thought it meant to healthcare, and how we embody it at Avidation, where I am now. He basically makes this case that if you look back across the ages of progress, and this, granted, is a very US-centric view, I acknowledge that, and Alec acknowledges that at the first of this book. But if you look at the ages and eras of progress, you had the agricultural age, you had the industrial age, and now the digital age. And if you look at the core asset of each of those ages, agricultural age, core asset is land. Industrial Age, core asset was iron. Digital Age, core asset is data. And now you have to look at who owns the raw materials, who owns the core asset. In the Agricultural Age, it was landowners, right? And to some degree, you could argue we still have a huge amount of infrastructure and ownership, certainly in the US, around land ownership, certainly even in Silicon Valley. And the Industrial Age had companies, right? Companies owned the raw materials, they defined the market ecosystem. Look at the Carnegie family, right? Andrew Carnegie becomes a steel magnate, Carnegie family becomes extremely wealthy around raw materials, around iron ownership, mining coal, mining of raw materials, and developing that into steel, and then deploying that into the Iron Age, the Industrial Age. and everything from railroads to manufacturing centers. But here we are in the digital age, and for the first time, individuals own the raw materials. And this is such a profound shift that you cannot avoid having radical transformation in ecosystems being defined by this. The way that businesses will work will be redefined on the basis of this. And so at Evidation, we've always believed that this would be the basis for the new ecosystem and that there ought to be a company that wired up the new ecosystem based on the premise that populations of individuals in certain therapeutic areas or with certain conditions would in fact be the ultimate platform when you consider that they have data flowing through them all the time. they own that data, and they can permission that data for use into all sorts of use cases in healthcare. Now, there is a very, very big tradition of this already in healthcare in the way that clinical research historically has worked. In the US, we've been operating under what's known in evidence as an evidence-based medicine system since the late 1980s. It's been talked about for much longer than that, but really, if you go back and look at the original publications in the Journal of the American Medical Association, you'll see true evidence-based medicine frameworks pop up around the '80s going into the early 1990s. What that means is, is that we as an ecosystem, and that caregivers and physicians and hospital networks and all of the system would be delivering care on the basis of the evidence that had been shown to justify it, i.e., clinical trials. That's why clinical trials are so important. to the way that we operate in the U.S. healthcare system, and increasingly, frankly, around the world, although that's changed just in my own career. So, some of that has been fairly recent. Such that patients and their data have been enabling healthcare for 50 years of evidence-based medicine in the U.S. However, instead of the ecosystem being defined by them, they had to go into the ecosystem of brick-and-mortar healthcare to use it. And to be a part of that. That's the part that we thought would really need to change. And why now? Because we finally reached critical mass in healthcare of individuals integrating healthcare data into their daily lives. Thank you, mobile. Thank you, Google. Thank you, big tech companies who have made this happen, right? I mean, the healthcare ecosystem hasn't made this happen. They've been drug along. frankly. But this is finally starting to happen. And when I say critical mass, I literally mean this is recently that we've kind of crossed the threshold, as opposed to the traditional consumer tech sector where this is part and parcel and has been for a long time. So, my good friend Ryan O'Hanlon at Google, who we've been on panels more than once together, let me borrow a couple of his slides because I just think they're so telling. And if you look at Google searches for healthcare where and when I want it, And there's many different flavors of that, like healthcare near me, physician name near me, doctor near me, what kind of physician is near me. But there's all these categories. But if it's just about asking Google what's near me and how can I get to it quickly, that behavior, number one, is new, and number two, has only really come into being in the last 6 years. So you're looking at— this is actual data from Google that Ryan gave me. But there's something else that happened 3 years after we began to get critical mass here, and that's the ubiquity of mobile. And so you're probably also surprised to learn that it was only in 2016 that the majority of health-related searches on Google shifted to mobile. Right. Now, this is important because this now shifts our context for health out of our house. Because I don't know about you, but I'm not dragging my computer everywhere as much as I'm dragging my phone everywhere. Yes, I have my computer with me now, but ignore that. This is a really important shift because not only are we now asking and demanding that healthcare be near us and convenient to us and part of our schedule, we are inquiring and interacting with it In our daily lives, all the time, wherever we are, not just in an office or in our office at home.
