Spotify founder aims to transform healthcare
Fifteen years ago, at a relaxed pre-Christmas event where tech startups mixed with London’s tech journalists, I was approached by a man with the most inventive pitch I had ever heard. Shakil Khan told me he was an advisor and early investor in a radically different new music service started by a Swedish entrepreneur. He was going to give me a code to access the service over the weekend and he was sure I would love it. “And if you don’t, I’ll come and wash your car.”
Well, I laughed, went home and tried the desktop music streaming service which was built on the novel premise that people did not actually need to own their music, and I did indeed love it. So much so that I persuaded the BBC’s Ten O Clock News that Spotify was worth an item. Shakil Khan - known to all as Shak - did not wash my car but a while later he introduced me to the music service’s founder Daniel Ek, who gave me an early preview of its first mobile app. The rest, as they say, is history. Spotify went on to become Europe’s most successful tech company of the last 20 years, transforming the music industry - not, in the view of some artists, for the better - and making Daniel Ek a very wealthy man.
So when Shak got in touch to invite me to a London launch for a business he and Ek were funding, I was intrigued - especially as I haven’t been to a tech event for some years. When I arrived at a discreet London club it felt more like a private party than a press conference, with figures from the health and wellbeing industries rather than journalists in attendance.
The company we were there to celebrate was Neko Health, which has an even more ambitious mission than Spotify. It aims to be the catalyst for the transformation of healthcare to a focus on preventive medicine rather than just struggling to treat more and more patients who are already ill.
Its key weapon in this mission is an innovative body scanner - along with, inevitably, a garnish of AI - deployed in clinics in Sweden and now in London. The clinics offer customers a comprehensive health check based on the scan - although it is not clear to me how comprehensive given that the scanner does not look inside the body.
Nevertheless, the idea has been a huge hit - there has been a long waiting list for the one hour check up at the Stockholm clinic and when the London clinic opened for business, a whole year of appointments priced at £299 each went within a couple of hours. With good design and slick advertising the company has pulled off the unlikely trick of making a trip to the doctor sound like a fun experience.
The Chief Executive of Neko Health Hjalmar Nilsonne said in Sweden they had found a serious, undiagnosed condition in around 10% of the people they scanned, while 1% had been found to have a life threatening condition. But he said almost more important than that was that many of the majority who were healthy said they would come back for an annual check and that would enable problems to be spotted earlier, taking pressure off the healthcare system
Daniel Ek said he had started thinking about healthcare a decade ago when people in Sweden would come up to him to express their enthusiasm for what he had done with Spotify:”I kept saying the same thing - I'm so happy to hear that. But it's not like we're saving lives.” Then he realised that while life in general was getting better for most people, a lot of the trends in healthcare were going in the wrong direction:
“It's one of the few categories where today, if you have a lot more money, you literally can get a better outcome than someone else.” He became convinced that the answer to halting the downward spiral where the cost of healthcare grew ever larger and inequality soared was to. catch illness at an early stage when it was less expensive to treat.
But I asked Daniel Ek why Neko was anything more than a bit of. fun for rich people who could afford £299 for an hour in his scanner - how would that benefit the marginalised? He said he did not expect health systems like the NHS to latch onto the idea straight away but, longer term, Neko hoped to offer a powerful demonstration of a better way forward:
“If you achieve preventive health care and not reactive health care, the costs will go down for the system, and the suffering goes down. So it is one of these Holy Grails, and everyone actually agrees with that. The only disagreement in the healthcare system is is it achievable - and how?”
It is good to hear a tech tycoon thinking big about solving important societal problems, but I suspect that Daniel Ek will find healthcare a tougher nut to crack than the music industry. Still, if he does succeed I’m happy to pop over and wash his car.
Healthy lifestyle. Eat well. No it's not expensive just don't eat majority of what you consume out of boxes packets or tubes. Move as much as you can. Try fit in some weight bearing activity especially as you age. Don't smoke or vape. Avoid recreatuinal drugs. Limit alcohol. Cut down salt sugar. Eat 30 types plants a week. Sleep well. Spend some time with like minded people ( find your tribe) read what you want spend some time alone in nature get a pet you can touch and feel and stroke.
This is interesting but I fear it will open the doors to wider healthcare inequality, not to mention increasing private sector access to medical data- which is where the real money lies and a big reason for venture capital to back “innovation “ like this. Swedish society is very different to ours ! I’d also like to see some evidence for the safety of yearly repeat MRI scans which are a powerful x-ray, not only for patients but for staff in the private clinic environment. AI should actually be able to calculate risk on an individual basis with some access to bloods, weight etc and then refer on for scans and more effective diagnostics. This would be much cheaper and probably as effective... perhaps less intriguing for people into the wellness industry however !