Capital One announced this week it is partnering with blockchain startup Gem to use the digital ledger technology to track claims for medical patients. I mention this not because it’s the most important story of the day, but because the notion of banks using the blockchain to address the nightmare that is our health payments system is just another sign of how quickly technology is changing the fundamentals of modern business.
And probably no industry faces more profound change than healthcare. Whether it is sensors tracking your vital statistics, or IBM Watson providing assistance in clinical diagnoses, or massive gene data providing new insights in personalized disease treatment, or the blockchain piercing the payments system, health care stands at the cusp of a transformation that my colleague Cliff Leaf says is the 21st century version of the discovery of penicillin. “Near simultaneous advances across an enormous spectrum of new tech – deep learning, big-data analytics, wearable sensors, hyperconnectivity, 3D printing, gene editing, virtual reality, and much more—are suddenly, and rapidly, shaking up a sector that now accounts for $3 trillion of spending every year in the U.S.,” Leaf says.
To chronicle that revolution, Leaf and Fortune writer Sy Mukherjee have started a new daily newsletter, Brainstorm Health Daily, which you can subscribe to here. And next week in San Diego, we will host our first Brainstorm Health conference, which brings together some of the leading business people, thinkers and innovators in this area to explore where the revolution is headed, including GSK CEO Andrew Witty, Fitbit CEO James Park, AthenaHealth CEO Jonathan Bush, IBM’s Deborah DiSanzo, Dr. David Agus, Deepak Chopra, Arianna Huffington and the founder of the aforementioned blockchain startup, Gem CEO Micah Winkelspecht. We’ll hit the highlights here in CEO Daily, but you can get deeper coverage in the Brainstorm Health Daily.