Connected World Without Disease Accelerator: Our Mission
The Connected World Without Disease Accelerator’s mission is to catalyze and accelerate the transformation of disease care, to one of health care, through the prevention, interception and cure of disease.
Our initial focus will be on Commonwealth countries, which have an unique Payer model, enhancing the opportunity to care for and interact with an individual over their entire life time.
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So much of our health care system is about disease care. Our dominant paradigm is “diagnose and treat”: we get sick and go to the doctor looking for help. But given the exponential increases in biological understanding and health care data we increasingly can shift to a “predict and pre-empt” paradigm in which we understand personalized risks and susceptibilities and track the earliest manifestations of disease – and intervene before it is too late. This will herald a transformation, from disease care to true health care.
This transformation requires not just technology innovations (e.g., diagnostics, precision interventions, integrated data / health mgmt. systems and AI/ML capabilities), but business model innovations to both encourage investment in this space and incentivize a new set of activities and behaviors.
For such a global opportunity, the role of the payer is critical, and a single payer system may be best suited to pilot and continuously learn as transformation occurs. We appreciate the ongoing work that is ongoing around the work, both at the research, translational and operational levels. We want to continue to enable this as well as create a forum where this learning can be shared across this developing ecosystem.
Ben Wiegand
CWWDA · Founding Partner
Each step in my professional journey has led me to this exciting point. The expertise I’ve honed during the last 25 + years, combined with remarkable advances in science and technology and a powerful network of collaborators and colleagues enables me to begin work to shift the paradigm in healthcare from diagnosing and treating disease to identifying early risk for disease and intercepting disease processes before they progress to illness. These efforts require the integration of many stakeholders, spanning scientific, clinical, regulatory, and commercial – all aligned to a vision, focused on the individual, creating wins for the patient, provider and payer together. When everyone wins, we have a sustainable healthcare system.
I am excited to work with so many visionaries in my role at CWWDA, continuing these efforts. We desire to build on the current set of clinical successes in this space and translate these clinical successes into patient and commercial successes for people and health care systems around the world. And by doing that, attract significant financial and human capital into this field, allowing for the next round of innovations that are necessary… each step getting closer to a world without disease.
I am thankful for my time at United Health group, gaining unique insights into the problems confronting payers as well as how decisions are made in terms of priority and directions. Connecting with a unique set of talent, both inside of United, as well as the many different solution providers UHG interacted with, helped to sharpen my view on what innovation would be needed and potential ways to integrate those solutions for the greatest effect.
My tenure at Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and Janssen was instrumental in planting the seeds of this world without disease vision – to address the root cause(s) of disease, intervene earlier than today’s clinically accepted point of diagnosis and stop, reverse or inhibit the progression to disease. Through a series of disease focused programs, in concert with a team of leading scientists and partners around the world, this experience in accelerating growth opportunities and scouting new and emerging scientific areas to deliver innovative solutions coupled with identifying and piloting new business and funding models has provided the experience to what is needed to bring this to life.
