Each month, What’s Next Health talks with leading thinkers about the future of health and health care. Recently, we talked with Daniel Kraft, medicine and neuroscience chair at Singularity University and executive director of FutureMed, about the potential of exponential technologies to accelerate change. In this post, Senior Program Officer Paul Tarini reflects on Daniel's visit to the Foundation.

When we look at new technology, especially health care technology, we often ignore expense for the excitement of the new. More than one paper has been written citing new technology as an underlying driver of rising health care costs. 

Some of this is the result of the problems we want our technology to solve. We tend to lean toward developing and employing new technologies that are “heavy” interventions against a particular disease, and those technologies are more likely to be expensive.  

But when you start looking at technologies that are more about helping people live healthier lives, more behavioral, more wellness facing, these will likely be less expensive and their impact will be more exponential.

From: Paul Tarini

To: Christine Nieves, Beth Toner and Thomas Goetz

Date: June 7, 2013

Thomas, I agree with your description that Health Datapalooza is the place to be. For me, this year's conference was a great experience and offered a really rich environment for networking. At RWJF's booth and throughout the conference, I had conversation after conversation with a range of people who are interested in liberating data and using liberated data. I talked with researchers, entrepreneurs, health care providers, people from state and federal government, and representatives from large corporations. It was really quite impressive.

From: Paul Tarini

To: Christine Nieves, Beth Toner and Thomas Goetz

Date: May 30, 2013

I'm looking forward to my third Datapalooza conference next week. In many ways, data is the new frontier in helping people lead healthier lives and improving the quality and efficiency of care. I enjoy Datapalooza because it helps us see the current edge of this new frontier—from what data are available and what data people are trying to access, to new ideas about how people are using the data, whether it's for policy or for products and services.

We have witnessed tremendous innovation growth over the last several decades. However, with change comes the need to adjust traditional practices that are standard in health and health care. The academic publishing model is no exception.

The current model of academic publishing treats traditional clinical trials as the gold standard for what gets published. Health and health care observers have long argued that focusing on trial results slows down the process of discovery and hinders practice innovation. In addition, the economics of this traditional publishing model are being challenged in our new reality of online, open-access publishing.

But what is the solution? Can we accelerate how we review and disseminate information without compromising the value of the traditional model? How can we improve on what has become the “gold standard” of academic publishing?

Happiness is gaining currency today, particularly in relationship to health and medicine. That’s what we’ve been hearing ever since Harvard School of Public Health researchers Julia K. Boehm and Laura Kubzansky published their report “The Heart’s Content: The Association Between Positive Psychological Well-Being and Cardiovascular Health” in the Psychological Bulletin, under a grant from Pioneer. This is the first study of its kind to look closely at how positive psychological well-being—including happiness and optimism—plays a role in heart health.

The story was indeed hot – gaining attention from USA Today, The Huffington Post, TIME’s Healthland blog, WebMD, The New York Times’ Well Blog, ABCNews.com, MensHealth.com, ModernHealthcare.com, Oprah.com, and hundreds more – and being shared throughout social networks and on the web.