Esther Dyson Launches Population Health Challenge

A tech investor with a proven track record of attracting innovation and money to a variety of endeavors is looking for a few good communities to compete for the greatest improvement in five measures of health and economic vitality.

Healthcare ladies and gentlemen, start your communities.

That was the call on April 10 from angel investor and tech advisor Esther Dyson, whose population health dream has taken a big step toward reality with the launch of the Way to Wellville competition.

From now until May 23, Dyson's nonprofit startup, HICCup, is inviting communities to apply to be one of five contestants in a five-year-long competition to get healthy using everything from the latest fitness gadgets to reality TV. Dyson is HICCup's founder and chairman of EDventure Holdings.

The 20-page application form is not for the casual applicant. Individuals or consultants need not apply – we're talking community health organizations, other nonprofits or perhaps the local Better Business Bureau.

Esther Dyson's Population Health Dream

Why bother? Several reasons. Dyson is an early investor in all sorts of innovative startups, with a proven track record of attracting innovation and money to a variety of endeavors over the past 25 years. She also is a great listener, having convened various listening sessions around the country last fall to get this latest idea off the ground.

Dyson's fledgling organization, HICCup, found its footing in those sessions, and also a CEO, Rick Brush, who spent nearly a decade at Cigna, where he was chief strategy and marketing officer for the national employer segment and launched the payer's Communities of Health venture.

At one of those early scoping sessions, Brush asked the kinds of tough questions about what Way to Wellville should be measuring that landed the answers in HICCup's FAQ and himself in the CEO's chair, Dyson tells me.

A 'Learning Lab for Health'
"What we're trying to do is almost create a learning lab for health with subsidiary projects and contests along with the five-year marathon," Dyson says.

Back to that lengthy application, which goes beyond asking about a community's healthcare, straight to the health of a community, seeking such metrics as percentage of temporary residents, household income, poverty levels, and a slew of outcomes data – percentages of a community with diabetes, heart disease, asthma, smoking status, obesity and more.

Applicants also have to describe their top previous successes and failures trying to improve community health, healthcare financing innovations such as ACOs, patient-centered medical homes, population health, bundled payments, and so on.

In other words, it's a lot of the things that HealthLeaders readers are currently embarking on both individually and collectively. And if the prestige of being selected for the first-of-its-kind national competition of sorts doesn't intrigue you, there are a couple of other things to consider.

First is the cash prize at the end of the five years. HICCup itself won't be rewarding such a prize, but hopes to raise $5 million for it. "Honestly, contestants are going to have to spend $15 to $50 million as a community to do this, so you're not doing this for the prize, though of course it matters to some extent," Dyson says.

Second, and more importantly, Way to Wellville contestants will become part of a larger community amongst the five competing communities. They will meet face-to-face in September at an annual conference, Next Step to Wellville, about a month after the five competing communities are selected.

The actual judging of who wins in 2019 has yet to be decided, but it will be a third party for legal and fiduciary reasons. Dyson emphasizes that the organization doesn't have all the answers yet.

Metrics Matter
If you believe, like I do, that healthcare is closer than ever to some tectonic shakeups courtesy of technology, then Way to Wellville is likely to be a great observation post. Innovative medical hardware and software companies are already flocking to a variety of competitions such as this. Way to Wellville is just taking a bigger view of what kind of population health solutions will ultimately be necessary.

Expect also a lot of intermediate measurements and competitions.

"We're hoping that some of these quantified self vendors will come in and donate devices to the communities and so we'll have Fitbit and Fuelband contests," Dyson says. "[Add to that] the county health rankings and all of these sorts of official measures, most of which are a year or two old, and we're all going to get a lot more real-time data."

"You can't report transitions to diabetes every month," Dyson says, "so there will be some health measures that are kind of yearly, but then there are, the outcomes measures tend to be slow. The input measures, like the percentage of school lunches that contain no French fries or something, you can measure in more real time."

The $15 to $50 million table stakes per community sounds daunting to me. "It's not the community goes and gets a $50 million grant from somebody," Dyson says. "It's more than they get a $10 million grant for, let's say, heart health. There's a $2 million program for food subsidies for fruits and vegetables. There are accountable care organizations that find an investor to improve the health so that their costs go down. There are social impact bonds."

Philanthropists Wanted
"So it's a combination of a large number of different kinds of funding from donors, from social investors, from vendors giving in-kind services or goods, and maybe in outer years, the school board raises a bond to do something with the school lunch. Each community is going to need to get money and support from a variety of courses in a variety of funds.

"We'll be looking for people who want to invest in various ways of producing health. We're also looking for donors [and] philanthropists."

And of course, Dyson is reaching out to her famous set of angel investor friends. The goal, of course, is to go beyond that. Another way to maintain excitement on Dyson's agenda is "a cheesy reality TV show" and perhaps a documentary.

As we see more and more crowdfunded efforts springing up in healthcare technology, Dyson's approach has some similarities – with perhaps a crowd with deeper pockets, or at least one that's been around the startup block a time or two.

Dyson hopes for up to 50 applicants for the five spots, and already has solid interest from several communities. Her population health dream is alive, and by this fall we should start to see some manifestations of it.