Esther Dyson (@edyson) is executive founder of The Way to Wellville (@WaytoWellville), an open-source, evidence-generating nonprofit project devoted to defining and testing models for producing community health (not health care) that will return profits to investors and health to the participants. HICCup is working with the five Way to Wellville communities to accelerate their own efforts to produce health; they are Lake County, CA; North Hartford, CT; Muskegon County, MI; Clatsop County, OR; Spartanburg, SC.
Wellville’s motto is “Don’t rent your health. Invest in it!” The 10-year project’s long-term goal is to spur the development of health as a new asset class that investors can invest in, much as they might invest in portfolios of mortgages. Yes, there are a few complications – including fragmentation across time and payers/beneficiaries.
Aside from Wellville, Dyson spends her time nurturing start-ups as an angel investor, with a recent focus on health care and aerospace. On the health side, she is an investor in 23andMe (also a director), Applied Proteomics, Care.coach, Clover Health, Eligible, Enso Relief, GoQii, Health Loop, HealthTap, i2Dx, Medesk, mEquilibrium, Nuna, Omada Health, PatientsLikeMe, PatientsKnowBest (UK), Prognos, Resilient, Big Health (UK), StartupHealth, Tocagen, Valkee (Finland), Vital Score and Wellpass (also a director).
From October 2008 to March of 2009, she lived in Star City outside Moscow, Russia, training as a backup cosmonaut.
Esther Dyson on Investing in Holistic Health
Esther Dyson invested her own money into 5 mid-sized American cities in an ambitious effort to figure out what ails us and how we can get better.
Esther Dyson: Health not Healthcare
Session Description: Will tech help us stay healthier? How will digital tools assist patients and help the system improve? An excerpt of the Health not Healthcare panel is below, but the full transcript can be accessed here. Kirkpatrick: We’re going to start with a big picture discussion about how technology plays a role, or doesn’t play a role, […]
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