What Is Inclusive Care™?
Inclusive Care is a new way of looking at human health in its entirety. Inclusive Care includes all health determinants (not just genetic or clinical), applies evidence-based analytics, hyper-personalizes the information to the individual, and then makes it all available, and accessible, to everyone, regardless of race, education, or economics. But how did we come up with the concept? I think that a little historical context can help explain why we feel that now is the right time for us to begin thinking of health more holistically.
Today’s form of care is a natural outcome of thousands of years of scientific inquiry. The earliest records of medical care can be traced back to Babylon, Egypt, China, and India, and many of us are familiar with the Hippocratic Oath from Greece in the 5th century BC. Hippocrates of Kos is credited with kicking off what would become modern Western medicine, with one of his critical insights being that diseases stemmed from natural causes, and not from godly interventions or other superstitious phenomena.
For the next 2000 years there would be countless breakthroughs that would yield greater and greater insights into the human body. Much of the earlier work focused on larger organs and structures that could be seen with the naked eye, but eventually we started realizing that there were elements far too small to be seen, some that could greatly affect our health. The 1800’s were a particularly productive time in the discovery of microorganisms (Louis Pasteur), genetics (Gregor Mendel), antibiotics (Alexander Fleming), and many other concepts that would have been considered science fiction to earlier generations. The beauty of science is that it builds upon itself and, although the connections aren’t always clear, they eventually start forming larger and larger pieces, with entire segments seemingly appearing overnight when a critical link is identified.
Then in the 1900’s things really took off. Not only had epidemiology and computers been invented in the previous century by John Snow and Charles Babbage, respectively, but science was becoming more accessible to larger populations through greater access to education. If initially our scientific advances were a form of crawling, then by the end of the 1800’s we were jogging, then running. By today’s standards, we’re in an all out sprint.
In the 1900’s research branched in different directions, with many still hyper-focused on clinical medicine, but others advancing adjacent and related fields, such as the effects of Socioeconomic factors on mental health (1930’s). Fifty years later, the WHO defined Environmental factors as “those aspects of the human health and disease that are determined by factors in the environment”, and shortly thereafter public health began paying more attention to Behavioral factors, and putting efforts in place to change people’s personal habits and attitudes in order to prevent disease. Finally came the Human Genome Project in the 1990’s and the advent of Genomic medicine in the early 2000’s. To be sure, many of these fields traced their roots back to people like Pasteur and Mendel in the 1800’s, but now they were picking up steam as entire segments of the population began devoting their entire careers to them.
And, yet, for the most part all of these fields operated in silos. In fact, much of the discoveries were esoteric and found within articles or data sets meant for specialists. And when advances made their way into population health, they were often exceptionalized and available only to the privileged parts of society with access to advanced forms of care and education. Those discoveries are no less useful to the rest of us, or our families, or our friends. So who will cover that last mile, where we collate those insights and make them actionable, particularly for people without the resources or education to decrypt all of the data?
We present Inclusive Care™. Inclusive Care for us encapsulates the best of what modern medicine can deliver to everybody. In fact, we created Inclusive Care by imagining where science and medicine were going in the future and then projecting backward to figure out what we could do today to get us there. Imagine a time when a predisposition in your genes alerts you to an environmental toxin that could be particularly dangerous to you, and your clinician tailors care to monitor you more regularly, while prescribing preventive steps that are aligned with your lifestyle and economics. We believe that it reflects a scientific approach to holistic care. It looks at people through a macro lens, accounting for all aspects of care, and distilling down complicated scientific data into a hyper-personalized and actionable framework to identify potential risks early, and to prevent them entirely, if possible. Key aspects of Inclusive Care are that it includes:
All health determinants in light of the patient, who is viewed as a whole,
Automated risk stratification and prevention, using clinically validated analytics,
The patient, with agency and dignity in their own decision-making and care,
The clinician, with enhanced clinical views that complement their training,
The village, with ways to share ideas and engage in the best care for their loved ones, and
All people, regardless of ancestry, education, or wealth as participants in an accessible form of care that sees them, all of them, where they are, and meets them there.
Inclusive Care takes some of the best principles of precision medicine, population health, science and society, and offers a new way of thinking about individual health. One that treats the person as an interested party, with needs and agency to participate in their own care and helping to fill the gaps that our modern health care system overlooks – all while taking action when measures are known to prevent harm in the first place. And, although it includes some fairly sophisticated concepts, modern consumer technologies have made it possible to democratize the information and make it accessible to anybody with a phone.
Our goal at Modelo Health is to look broadly at all aspects that impact health, dive deeply where necessary to extract key learnings, transform this information into something that elevates our understanding of human health, and then make these findings relevant to everybody, everywhere to lead healthier, happier lives. We call this Inclusive Care.
See related articles where we take a deeper dive into Inclusive Care:
1. What is Inclusive Care: Holistic Information
2. What is Inclusive Care: Addressing Gaps
3. What is Inclusive Care: Equity and Agency
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