Benjamin Tseng
Associate Fellow, Technology and Public Policy
Chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart failure are significant burdens on health-care systems around the world and afflict a significant and growing fraction of the global population (potentially 60 per cent of the US adult population and nearly 40 per cent of the UK adult population). In fact, the cost of managing these chronic diseases already drives a significant majority of health-care expenditure in many countries (86 per cent in the US and around 70 per cent in the UK).
The current crisis underscores the societal urgency to tackle the growing public-health problem represented by chronic diseases. The failure of efforts to contain them has been a result of a complex morass of medical, behavioural, and socioeconomic factors that have proven difficult for traditional health-care delivery models to address. A solution here will require a bold rethinking of traditional models of health-care delivery that should incorporate new digital health-care solutions.