Intelligent Health: The Movement to Unify Data, Harness Ai, and Empower People to Thrive - Hardcover

by Nasim Afsar (Author)

An audacious vision and actionable roadmap to a future where your health is unified, intelligent, and truly yours

Health is failing and care is fragmenting--and together they're bankrupting America. How do we break through today's maze of silos and create a single, person-first system that actually delivers health? In Intelligent Health: The Movement to Unify Data, Harness AI, and Empower People to Thrive, physician-executive and global health strategist Dr. Nasim Afsar delivers a bold yet practical blueprint for transforming health and care. Drawing on nearly two decades of leadership at the highest levels--from serving as Chief Health Officer at Oracle to leading billion-dollar health systems----Dr. Afsar shows how we can move from today's fragmented, reactive model to one that is personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory.

Intelligent Health makes an uncompromising case that unifying all of your health data, applying intelligence to it, and owning it outright is no longer optional--it's essential to improving outcomes, lowering costs, and restoring humanity to care. Drawing on compelling stories, actionable strategies, and deep expertise--shaped by partnerships with White House and global health agencies as well as serving on healthcare technology boards--this book is both a blueprint for transformation and a rallying cry for consumers of health and care, innovators, investors, policymakers, and health and care leaders alike.

Inside you'll discover:

• Three unprecedented forces converging to rewrite the future of health and care
• The reimagination of health and care through a unified, intelligent, consumer-owned platform
• The impact and identity reckoning on the ecosystem--from app developers and wearables to retail, regulators, payers, pharma, and hospitals
• How to mitigate critical challenges like trust, security, and environmental impacts that led to past failures

From consumers of health and care to industry leaders, Intelligent Health empowers you to convert data into powerful insights about the present and predictive intelligence for the future, putting you in charge of your health destiny. The movement starts now--because your health, your care, and our collective future can't wait.

Front Jacket

It is undeniable: Our current health ecosystem was not designed to promote health or prevent disease. It was built to react and manage illness only after symptoms occur. But today it is not even succeeding at that: chronic disease rates climb relentlessly, outcomes worsen year after year, and health and care grow more expensive. Worse still, the person who should be at the center, is treated as a vessel for their illness, valued for the revenue they generate. Meanwhile, healthcare systems, payers, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, and technology firms compete fiercely for growth and survival. The truth is that no one is competing to make you healthier. We've reached a breaking point where the system doesn't just fail; it actively harms people through preventable suffering, and bankrupts families through inexcusable waste.

Enter Intelligent Health. A fundamental reimagining around a different center of gravity: you. It begins by unifying all your health and care data--clinical, behavioral, environmental, genetic, and social--to see the complete picture of what shapes your health. It applies artificial intelligence to transform that data into actionable insight for today and predictive foresight about the future, catching emerging risks before they cascade into crises. Most radically, it aligns the entire ecosystem of health and care around you.

Today, consumer health solutions multiply while outcomes stagnate. Costs spiral while access shrinks. Technology advances while coordination collapses. Intelligent Health offers what incremental reform cannot: an audacious blueprint for health and care to create a system that is more human, more intelligent, and built to advance health.

Drawing on 20 years transforming systems, Dr. Afsar creates both a visionary framework and an actionable roadmap for anyone who believes we can do better and refuses to wait any longer. We know what's broken. We know what's needed. Now we must decide: How many more people will suffer under the old system while we debate building the new one?

Intelligent Health is for anyone who wants better health and care--individuals, families and caregivers, clinicians and care teams, health care delivery systems, insurers, pharmaceutical and biotechnology innovators, medical device and digital health companies, and policymakers and regulators.

Back Jacket

Praise for Intelligent Health

"In a healthcare system defined by fragmentation, Intelligent Health provides a path forward--one that aligns the many parts of our ecosystem around what matters most: the person. Dr. Nasim Afsar combines the insight of a physician with the precision of an operator to show how technology and purpose can come together to drive lasting transformation."
-- Marc Harrison, MD, Strategic Advisor at General Catalyst, Co-Founder and former CEO at HATCo, Former CEO at Intermountain Healthcare

"There is no field more ready for reinvention than health and care, and no better moment than now. With the technologies finally in place to make this vision real, Intelligent Health lays out a bold and actionable path toward a truly person-centered system, one that advances health while ensuring the sustainability of the enterprises that serve it."
-- David Feinberg, MD, MBA, Chairman, Oracle Health and Life Sciences, Former Head of Google Health, Former CEO & President of Geisinger and UCLA Health

"Dr. Nasim Afsar's Intelligent Health offers an excitingly disruptive and actionable framework that stands to put the power to determine our own health destiny into the hands of people living it."
-- Karen DeSalvo, MD, Former Chief Health Officer, Google, Former Commissioner Medicare Payment Advisory Commission

"Healthcare is a vast and complex ecosystem--patients, providers, payers, pharma, innovators--often moving in parallel rather than together. Intelligent Health offers an innovative technological solution that unifies the system and reorients it around the person, aligning us toward the shared outcome of health."
-- Patrick Conway, MD, CEO, Optum, UnitedHealth Group, Former CEO Blue Cross NC, Former Director CMS Innovation Center

Author Biography

Nasim Afsar, MD, MBA, is a global healthcare executive with nearly two decades of leadership experience transforming health and care. She has served as Chief Health Officer at Oracle, led billion-dollar health systems as Chief Operating Officer at UCI Health, and advanced population health management and value-based care as an Associate Chief Medical Officer at UCLA Health. Dr. Afsar has worked with healthcare delivery systems, payers, pharmaceutical and medical device companies, and technology firms. She has partnered with the White House and global health agencies and serves on multiple boards. She brings a powerful combination of clinical expertise, operational leadership, and technological insight--rare experience that grounds her commitment to reimagining the future of health and care.