This week’s talk felt less like a lecture about healthcare and more like a glimpse into a future that is already quietly arriving. Dr George Savage is a Visiting Fellow and founder of The Fulcrum Neuroscience, and he came all the way from California to give this talk.
He challenged one of the assumptions we rarely question: why do we still spend so much effort treating disease only after people get sick?
A system that needs to change.
Dr Savage described modern healthcare as a sick-care system dominated by large old institutions (or ‘dinosaurs’). This system is mainly built around diagnosis and treatment rather than prediction and prevention. But this won’t be the case forever.
According to Dr Savage, advances in computation and AI could be the ‘asteroid impact’ that reshapes healthcare. Right now, we have fragmented systems where doctors only see snapshots of patients during short appointments. However, we may move towards systems that learn from us all the time. As he put it, these systems never sleep, never forget, and never see only fifteen minutes of your life.
A parallel system
At the centre of the talk was what Dr Savage called the ‘new stack’ of healthcare. These interconnected layers include:
- Wearable devices, including smart watches
- Continuous health tracking and sensing technologies
- Data from different parts of biology, known as multi-omics data
- Digital copies of the body to map what could happen
Alongside this, the system treats factors like sleep, diet, and exercise as core parts of health instead of secondary recommendations. Incentives would also need to change so that healthcare systems reward prevention rather than intervention.
What stood out most was Dr Savage’s rejection of the idea that healthcare can simply be fixed by making the existing systems slightly better (‘reformed dinosaurs’). Instead, we need a parallel system that is smaller, more adaptive, and potentially more effective.
We need a coalition
The audience quickly raised hard questions. Concerns about surveillance, privacy, anxiety, inequality, and money dominated the discussion after the talk. Could constant monitoring create more fear than wellbeing? Who controls this data? And who gets access to these technologies?
Dr Savage addressed these concerns directly. Technology alone, he argued, is not the answer. These systems need education, ethical rules, and consensual data sharing. Above all, we need a coalition between researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and builders.
