Jay Walker made his fortune in the world of high tech with internet plays such as Priceline.com, which he founded in 1998 and took public a year later, but the man once dubbed "An Edison of the New Age" by Forbes magazine sees the next big things coming from healthcare.
"What happened in the data processing world is coming to medicine," he told an audience of health care executives in New York this week. "There’s no question that the Facebooks of tomorrow are going to be in healthcare."
Walker, a featured speaker at the American Heart Assn.’s Hi2 forum said there are currently 2 revolutions going on in healthcare that will change the practice of medicine.
"We are for the 1st time beginning to understand what is going on inside our body. The body has always been a black box and we’ve had very little knowledge of what’s going on inside. Even issues like heart disease and cancer manifest themselves for many years and we have very little understanding of what’s going on," he said.
"The 2nd thing that’s happening is consumers are showing up at the healthcare party for the 1st time in history. Healthcare has always been a top-down – the doctor at the top and a system to deliver. It’s being flipped like every other industry has been flipped, where the patient that is actively engaged in their own health is going to be in charge. We’ve never seen that before but we’ve seen it in entertainment, in news, music, finance and now we’re going to see it in health."
Walker specifically pointed to the proliferation of wearable sensors, a market that’s still in its infancy. Devices such as Jawbone and Fitbit movement and heart-rate trackers are growing in popularity and are poised to hit an inflection point for health-conscious consumers.
"Right now we don’t wear a lot of sensors, except for the very early adopters, but soon you’re going to wear, swallow and live sensors," Walker said. "We’re going to instrument, for the 1st time, the gigabytes of us."
He cautioned, however, that there needs to be more funding for basic research beyond what takes place at the National Institutes of Health.
"We need to fund some of the crazy stuff and we can’t fund it at the NIH," he said. "We in the private sector, as leaders, have to step up and say we need to invent new mechanisms that make funding desirable. The real power comes from basic research and that’s where we need to rethink where we fund it. "
