Krishna Yeshwant has battle-scarred first-hand the many sides of the health care system. He’s a Boston-based doctor who remedies patients, but also invests in start-ups that are attempting to fix some of the scheme’s biggest problems with the U.S. health care system through Alphabet’s investment class GV.
So we asked him to come up with “a crazy thing in health care” to portion with the CNBC.com audience.
For Yeshwant, the first challenge was in narrowing it down to ethical one thing.
“How could I pick just one?” he asked, as his answer would depend on what he’s wrestle with at that particular moment. But after a few minutes describing some of the goofy things that happen in the policy world and in emergency rooms (numerous on that for a later column), he honed in on a gripe: “Nobody pays entirely much attention to prevention,” he explained. “But we spend so much time and power on treating those who are already sick.”
In his career as an investor, Yeshwant has eject time with a lot of start-ups that are developing new diagnostic tests to uncover whether a resolute is more likely to get a disease, or to catch it at an earlier stage when it’s lighter to treat. He also looks at new ways to prevent disease, which is a notoriously under-funded square footage. Studies show that for every dollar spent on health worry, only about four cents goes toward public fitness and prevention. On average, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries spend about $1.70 on social services for every $1 on healthiness services; while the U.S. spends just 56 cents.
Medical suffering and treatment for those who are already sick gets the vast majority of our readying and attention. And that’s very difficult to change.
It also prevents investors derive Yeshwant from seeing many business opportunities in fixing the question.
One illustration (although that’s starting to change) is the resistance among numberless insurers to pay for tests that are designed to diagnose diseases earlier, or shroud people for potential risks before they get sick. It’s also approvingly challenging for entrepreneurs to build businesses that offer alternatives to deadens, such as lifestyle approaches that are known to be effective.
As a doctor, he make benefit from more tests and tools that help him outstrip understand disease, so he doesn’t need to rely on educated guesswork to boon the symptoms.
“It’s such a crazy thing because it’s hard to treat someone if you don’t identify what the disease is,” he said. “We just don’t pay for that enough. We only pay for treatment. And that concludes in us sometimes treating entirely the wrong thing. That happens.”
In other sectors, highly-paid physicians will come in to diagnose the problems at a workplace and help the business apprehend the underlying issue. That’s considered highly valuable. “But somehow the diagnostic organize in medicine is tremendously undervalued,” he explained.
One reason it got that way, in Yeshwant’s observe, is that we developed drugs that seemed to work well in alleviating specific ti, but we didn’t figure out the underlying mechanism of why they work. An example is in communicable disease, where we attempt to diagnose infections by taking a sample and feigning it in a plate of sugar and waiting for it to grow for up to 3 to 5 days. And in the meantime, we try out different treatments until something clicks.
That’s a force, says Yeshwant, as we have the capacity to sequence the microbes, but these check up ons are only infrequently paid for.
“We can say that we don’t know so why should we even look, let’s fitting treat it,” he said. “But more often than not, if you don’t know what’s concerning something you can’t cure it.”