The Business of Prevention

Is The Spotify Philosophy building The Future Of Healthcare

Hey Friends,

Welcome back to another edition of the Business of healthcare. We have 18 subscribers currently, if you are one of those people thank you so much for being part of this community.

This week I visited Neko Health, a company founded by Daniel Ek (Spotify Founder) and Hjalmar Nilsonne. When I started documenting my journey, this was one of the clinics I really wanted to get on the series. This was simply because I feel like they are really pushing the boundaries of what healthcare means. I caught up with the lead GP and learned a lot from the experience.

1. Subjective vs Objective: In medicine there are many metrics that are subjective such as how things sound, smell, and feel. There are many different ways to interpret these clinical markers. Neko has found a way to allow us to track this data and with repeated scans over the years you can have a longitudinal data set of your heart sounds so we can truly see if things have changed.

2. Prevention as a business model: Prevention is better than cure is something as old as time. People have known for decades that this is the way forewards yet it is rarely practiced. This is largely due to the business models in healthcare do not incentivise prevention. A large part of western health systems are reactive, we wait for things to happen and then react. People can make money when an intervention is done, however people are not paid for preventing a stroke?
   Neko is allowing consumers to pay directly to get insights about their health that will prevent them from going to hospital in the future. When you charge the consumer in this way, the service and the product has to be 10/10 to justify the spend. The experience has to be leagues about the traditional health experience so that by the time the consumer leaves, price is the last thing on their mind.

Where does the future of Neko lie?

I believe we are still in phase 1 of Neko and what they can truly do. Their moat will be around the data that they capture. Critics state that there is a lot of ‘worried well’ people who engage with this service, the reframe Dr. Sam uses in the episode i filmed with him is those who are engaged with their health. Everyone going through a scan is essentially building up a database of what ‘normal’ looks like. This data becomes extremely valuable when it is longitudinal. When we can see how a disease progressed over the years or how early warning signs of heart sounds changing before catching something else. This is where the beauty for Neko will lie.

I also believe in the not too distant future Neko will launch a companion platform. Imagine an LLM that is trained on your scans at a point in time but can integrate with your daily habits. This increases the value of that longitudinal data. Ultimately they are creating a ‘health system’ within the Neko universe that understands you so well.

They have recently raised $260m and i’m excited for where they will head. I believe that healthcare should be an experience. Healthcare should feel like a high end consumer/conceirge service. This is exactly what they are doing!

Until next time friends, x

Here is a 20min breakdown into the episode

Neko Health YT Video

Malone