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For your child, there is no cure,
the words that no parent wants to hear.
But those were the words the doctor said about my little nephew, Ian, at age four.
Ian went suddenly from being his normal, sunshine,
energetic self, to being sick in a hospital,
holding on to his teddy bear and holding on for life.
The doctor said it was very close,
apparently a lot of kids die because they're not diagnosed in time.
And then he said those words, he said, there is no cure.
He said, we think we're about 10 to 15 years away from a cure,
but then again, we said that 15 years ago.
And I know many of you don't have to imagine what that feels like
because you or someone you love has been through something similar.
Now in Ian's case, it was juvenile type I diabetes.
There's nothing you can do to prevent type I.
And once you have it, it affects every meal you eat, every jog you take,
every night sleep you have for the rest of your life.
It dramatically complicates every other disease you get.
For Ian, at school, getting a cold or
a flu from another kid is actually a very serious affair.
And Ian has to check in with the school nurse four times every single day.
And if you knew Ian, if you knew him like I do, then you would be so,
so proud of the amount of courage inside of that little person every single day.
Now I'm trained as an economist, but I love people.
And if you know any economist, you know that those two don't always go together.
>> [LAUGH] >> Dean Levon in the back's
laughing a bit.
>> [LAUGH] >> So for me,
Ian raises a very important question, which is, as a society,
what are the binding constraints keeping us from cures,
from making the deadly manageable and making the manageable curable?
And I think the answer may surprise you.
See, I find that many of us imagine where cures come from to be something like this.
Some scientist with gray hair somewhere with a chemistry said,
maybe even something a bit like that.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
I think I know where we get that from.
I mean, this is a real photo, one of medicine's greatest hits,
the accidental discovery of penicillin by Sir Alexander Fleming.
But there's one problem, that was in 1928.
[LAUGH] Do you think anything's changed, perhaps, since then?
Yes, today, we have a process, it's a process we trust.
And it is long, it is regulated, it is complicated and
it moves science into clinical trials and clinical trials into medicine.
And if we want this process to work, if we want the scientists to have
the data that they need, if we want clinical trials to run on time,
if we want patients to have safe and effective medication and
to be notified when there's a cure for them, then we need a big, big idea.
We need connected health intelligence.
Let me give you an example.
So a couple of weeks ago, I was reading a blog post from Bill Gates,
he was writing about Alzheimer's disease, no cure today for Alzheimer's.
And he wrote the number one barrier to a breakthrough in Alzheimer's,
number one, is a more efficient way to recruit patients for
clinical trials earlier in the diseases progression.
They need to find the right patient at the right time.
And this isn't just a problem for Alzheimer's.
Today, we're running ten times more clinical trials than we were in the early
2000s.
That's a huge increase in our ability to find cures,
but over 80% of clinical trials can't recruit enough patients on time.
So what's keeping us from solving this matching problem?
We solve matching problems all day, every day.
We solve it in ride hailing,
we solve it in home sharing, in song suggestions, in matchmaking.
It's not even that hard to imagine some sort of Google search
across all health information, but it doesn't exist.
We don't have connected health intelligence.
It's not for lack of data, healthcare is generating more
data than any other industry in the entire world.
So what is it?
What is it that is keeping the researchers trying to find cures,
the doctors trying to prevent diseases earlier in the progression,
the people who are trying to save your life from that data?
It's killing people, and it is a big, big problem.
So what are we going to do?
Well, the good news, and there is good news, everyone, there is good news,
is that the three major barriers, the three major
barriers to connected health intelligence have now been overcome.
So I'm going to walk you through these three.
And I think by the end you'll agree that the future of healthcare is going to look
very different than it does today.
Those barriers were one, making health information digital.
Two was structuring the information.
And three, the hardest of all, was preserving patient privacy.
So let's walk through these.
Number one, I want you to imagine the clipboard.
The clipboard, the enemy of all progress in healthcare,
second only perhaps to the fax machine.
>> [LAUGH] >> You know what I'm talking about.
All of those papers with the grimy little pen that everyone else has coughed on.
And the chain, as though you'd want to take that pen home.
You know what I'm talking about.
>> [LAUGH] >> That's going away.
Now your health information is digital.
This really started accelerating about ten years ago, and
today 98% of hospitals are using some form of electronic health records.
So that brings us to number two, health information is digital, but
it's messy and unstructured.
You can kind of imagine it like millions and
millions of free text, doctors' notes in Word documents.
But in order to make sense of it,
we need it to look more like an Excel spreadsheet with nice rows and columns.
So what happened?
Well, it's the same technology that powers your Siri and your Alexa,
it's a branch of artificial intelligence called natural language processing.
And it's the way that computers are able to turn text into meaning.
And now, it is so good that we can scan those millions and
millions of documents, and highly technical documents, and
get structured information out of it, which is just Incredible.
But that brings us to three, and this has a lot to do with you and
me, this is patient privacy.
Your health records belong to you and mine belong to me.
They do not belong to any insurance company, any hospital, any researcher.
And as a society, we've chosen to value patient
privacy above researcher's need for transparency.
So what happened?
Well, just in the past few months, there have been breakthroughs
in decentralized private artificial intelligence.
And in fact, the first paper that's going to be published on this,
it's coming out in two days here at Stanford with applications in medicine.
So you're now all ahead of the curve.
This gives researchers the ability to ask questions and query information that they
don't otherwise have access to and is distributed due to privacy concerns.
So now, with these building blocks, we have all three things we need for
connected health intelligence.
And I think that it's going to change life for you and
for me and for people like Ian.
One of the reasons why I relate so
much to Ian's story is that in many ways, it's my own story.
When I was four years old, my parents, Ian's grandparents,
heard the words, for your son, there is no cure.
He will live with a life-threatening autoimmune disorder.
And I know personally what it would've meant as a kid to hear, we have a cure.
To avoid those painful moments of uncertainty,
those close calls where I wasn't sure if I was going to make it.
If I was going to be an adult one day.
If I would be here standing in front of you right now.
But being sick has a way of really clarifying for
you what matters the most and why.
And I think that the words that my kids will hear will be different.
I think the words that my kids will hear will be yes, yes, we have a cure.
Thank you. >> [APPLAUSE]
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