Can AI help you live longer?

William Kapp, MD, President and Co-founder of Fountain Life explains why the short answer is yes – but it’s all about the right data.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies present a broad array of opportunities to improve healthcare across the care continuum, including longevity. Increasing lifespan has long been an interest for researchers and healthcare professionals, but preserving quality of life throughout the aging process by identifying potentially debilitating diseases early is a more recent focus. The ability of AI to enable innovations around data is making it possible for life-threatening conditions like cancer, cardiac, metabolic, and neurodegenerative diseases to be diagnosed at their earliest stages.

Detecting asymptomatic disease is challenging because the human body is amazing at masking symptoms, but leveraging AI technologies is helping physicians make key diagnoses earlier than ever before.

Training a new category of AI
AI works by combining information from data sources, processing it, and generating meaningful insights that solve problems or suggest outcomes. The quality and type of data being sourced is crucial as it affects the integrity of the algorithms that use the data. The vast majority of data today is from symptomatic patients, limiting the information AI has to work with. Many chronic diseases and life-threatening conditions are asymptomatic or have no genetic indicators so are challenging to detect because the human body is amazing at masking symptoms. If we could collect quality data from asymptomatic people, AI algorithms would be even better informed and therefore more able to help physicians make key diagnoses earlier than ever before.

At Fountain Life, a preventive health and longevity company, we are actively building a database that will allow AI to move to “what’s next” and change the way medicine is practiced. Fountain Life is building the largest HIPAA compliant and protected, fully quantified database that will be used to train a new category of AI based on information from asymptomatic individuals. Integrating this new category of AI could move the healthcare system from reactive to preventive by identifying potential medical conditions earlier than ever before. Current Fountain Life members, who are asymptomatic and electively undergoing preventive health screenings, are paving the path for this new category of AI.

Today, AI helps medical professionals look for known issues by interpreting CT scans and images to help detect cancer and other potential health conditions. Tomorrow, AI could lead to the identification of new biomarkers for even earlier detection of diseases by using what is learned with data from asymptomatic people.

Changing the way medicine is practiced
Most people (in and outside of the healthcare community) would agree that the current US healthcare system is broken and unsustainable without some fundamental change. We will spend $4.5 TRILLION dollars on healthcare in the US this year – 20% of GDP – for some of the worst outcomes in the world. Why? Because the current model is based on “sick care” with the highest rewards coming from treating conditions that are symptomatic and require acute care. The current healthcare system is paid when you break, but the reality is you want to avoid being broken. Your doctor only gets paid to treat you when you are sick, there is no payment model for keeping you healthy. In fact, the sicker you are the more money the healthcare system makes. The system is predicated on you becoming sicker so they can make more money. The only way to fix the underlying problem in medicine is to get in front of it and that’s what we are aiming to do. The goal is to move the model from reactive to preventive.

Can AI help you live longer?