Why we started The Future Well.

In the next decade, a massive new market in the United States will arise– people will start spending more and more of their own hard earned money out of their own pockets on health and sickcare. When any new market arises, established companies and startups do their best to enter, make a difference, and start profiting. The health space is a complicated one. If companies don’t understand the nuances, the incentives, and consumer desires, they’ll probably unfortunately learn the hard way wasting a lot of time and money. So the smartest thing to do is get outside expertise to best understand the dynamics of the health and sickcare market. Grant deeply understands consumers. He created the wildly successful Tesco Clubcard, Virgin Healthmiles, and then headed up Humana’s innovation efforts. I’m a unique physician who understands the healthcare trenches and consumers. I’ve spent the past 4 years exploring health innovations. Combining our expertise simply made sense, especially when there are no design and innovation firms that deeply understand and specialize in health and consumers. There are firms that understand consumers. And there are firms that understand health. But nobody perfectly melds the two. Hence, The Future Well.

Why will this next decade bring such massive change in the health market? Because today’s version of healthcare is quickly becoming way too expensive. It currently costs an employer about $11,000 per year per employee for health insurance. At the end of this decade, it will cost about $28,500 per year per employee.

Companies will offset this out-of-control increase by requiring employees to spend more money out of their own pocket.

The definition of customer is “a person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or business. Therefore, the current customer of healthcare in America is the insurance company. In the next decade, more and more people will become true consumers of health and sickness and start spending their own money out of pocket, rather than having their insurance company micro-manage their health spending as they’re allowing now. Consumers won’t pay for today’s miserable healthcare experience. They’ll demand a better experience– a designed, pleasant experience that caters to their needs.

True consumerism in healthcare can work for about 90% of Americans. Ten percent of Americans account for 80% of $2.5 trillion dollars we spend on healthcare every year. That means 90% of Americans use a total of $500 billion every year for healthcare. This will rise to at least a $750 billion to $1 trillion market by the end of the decade. And this market will represent 90% of Americans. Obviously this is a massive new market, and it’s coming fast.

Today’s healthcare system, which should be called the Sickness Industry, focuses on care for sickness. Americans over the next decade will quickly realize that sickness is too expensive. Health will be far cheaper. So another new market will arise– the “help me optimize my health” market will keep people out of the sickness industry, feeling their best, and protect their financial well-being.

The companies that understand these massive opportunities and start building their strategies today will win in these newly forming markets. But only if they take lessons, not from today’s sickness experience, but from companies who have successfully won over the hearts and minds of American consumers, like Apple and Starbucks. A new health experience modeled off today’s consumer success stories will be the big winner.

We started The Future Well to help design and create innovative ways to:

• optimize health
• prevent sickness
• improve consumers’ financial well-being
• deliver a pleasant, fun, and inspiring process of engaging health and sickness that makes people feel more passionately human

In short, companies need to start designing health experiences today. The Future Well’s goal is to help those companies lay the foundation, the infrastructure both physical and virtual, to create a pleasant, and profitable, health experience that inspires people to live affordable, healthy, happy, and the most fulfilling lives possible.