How Deep Space Exploration Will Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

Arecord number of US patients died from flu last year, with 80 000 deaths recorded in 2017–18.

In the early hours of a recent Sunday morning, my son woke me, complaining of a high temperature. A spoonful of sugary antipyretic had us hoping for the best. Thirty hours later and with some extraordinary parental diligence, he was diagnosed with Influenza Flu B virus. Although well within the time-frame for an Antiretroviral to be most effective, this thirty hour window could have represented a major deterioration in his respiratory system. In hindsight, there’s a lot more I would do.

Laboratory or doctor’s office diagnostics are inefficient for clinical and economic reasons. Chronic care patients need to visit a lab for the most routine of tests. A visit to the doctor is intermediated by a referral to a lab which takes days for results to be available. Laboratory testing does not provide options for early detection or to monitor general wellness so that one can change behavior to improve health outcomes. The globalization of infectious diseases cannot easily be monitored at the point-of-care. Centralized Laboratory testing is expensive, inconvenient and requires too much human component.

Labcorp boasts that they travel between the earth and the sun each year to pick up your blood sitting in those metal boxes outside doctor’s offices.

It’s no wonder then that a 2014 study estimated that diagnostic errors happen about 12 million times per year in U.S. outpatients. Errors related to lab tests are more common than one might think.

The parental diligence of taking my son to the doctor relatively early, was based on the fact that there had been an outbreak of Flu at his school so I was predisposed to considering Flu rather than something more benign.

However, I didn’t know that my son, who is in 2nd grade, had recently learned that George Washington probably died of Flu B. While I spent a day brushing off the severity of his symptoms, he was quietly contemplating much worse.

In the end he rode through the course of the virus with ease and elegance.

When OneMilo, the company I founded, started to talk about lab tests anywhere and point-of-care testing, our paths crossed with NASAiTech like a pair of star-crossed ambitionists.

NASAiTech is an initiative by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) and aims to find innovative ideas that have the potential to overcome critical technology hurdles facing future exploration of the Moon and Mars, even though many were originally meant to solve important problems here on Earth.

NASAiTech became great supporters of OneMilo, even motivators and when the OneMilo co-founders and brothers started looking at Astronaut Kelly brothers’ health, especially what 330 days in space did to Scott Kelly, we understood NASA’s interest for in-situ blood diagnostics.

Broadly speaking, a compromised immune system was probably the cause for a host of virus being detectable in Astronaut’s blood. More data on immunosuppression in Space is needed. Also, weightlessness causing bone degradation releases minerals into the blood stream and in-turn creates metabolic issues and manifests kidney stones amongst other deteriorations in health.

In-spite of NASA’s safest iteration of a vehicle that is sufficiently fueled, supplied and un-compromised structurally, an even deeper risk to a mission is an Astronaut’s health. Prolonged separation from family, a grueling work regimen, motion sickness and poor diet are a few environmental contaminants to good health and require continuing development resources.

When OneMilo started to consider how its medical diagnostic technology could work on frontiers of space and earth where forces of astrophysics and nature exert extreme pressure on us, on the underserved and on Astronauts, OneMilo engineered a better diagnostic ecosystem.

The OneMilo path with NASAiTech resulted in improving the efficacy, efficiency, cost & environmental impact of its product system.

NASA represents a romanticism of the impossible tasks it sets, such as to launch a manned mission to Mars and back to earth, but in so doing it sets more pragmatic problems that require us all to solve.

In setting impossible tasks that require a myriad of problems to be solved, NASA may even fix some of the problems of the broken healthcare system.

OneMilo’s connected health ecosystem is an example of how the NASAiTech collaboration will change a thirty hour Influenza diagnosis and treatment into a few minutes.

Connected health aims to maximize healthcare resources and provide increased, flexible opportunities for consumers to engage with clinicians and better self-manage their care.

One Milo’s Connected Health Ecosystem is disrupting medical diagnostics by enabling lab tests to be self-performed anytime and anywhere for the first time with its $85 hand-held Analyzer paired with smart rapid-result test strips using finger-prick fluid samples of blood, urine or saliva.

Let us state the obvious, a smart rapid result influenza test at home live synched seamlessly to companion mobile applications for both the user and care provider. It’s that simple and it will cost less then $20.

The OneMilo mobile app tracks, trends and archives results making them available to your healthcare provider where they can interface with OneMilo’s clinical analytic and population management systems or with an electronic medical record. Each test, with a billing code, can be performed at home conveniently & economically covered by insurance.

Each test is designed to increase ROI for doctors, to be covered by insurance & provide clinical & economic improvements to patient care. The platform allows for the monitoring of the most common chronic conditions like high cholesterol, diabetes and thyroid disease as well as diagnostic tests for infectious diseases & tumor markers like PSA & a 100 others.

As a smart test is read, mapped to both a patient and care provider or payor, the system creates a natural audit trail of time, location and result which is updated to a cloud and OneMilo’s Care provider system.

One Milo’s technology creates many applications for changing behavior and monitoring health trends which are the largest drivers of changing health outcomes. The aim is to disrupt diagnostics to realize the interdependent goals of: Improving Outcomes; Enhancing Care Coordination; Maximizing Clinical Efficiency; Driving Consumer Engagement; and Reducing Costs.

The patent-pending product ecosystem includes telemedicine integrated into the One Milo App, offering consumers a seamless experiences of purchasing professional usage, lab diagnostics over-the-counter, self performing finger prick tests anytime and anywhere and receiving a report from those tests from their care provider.

Additional OneMilo systems for health population management and clinical analytics with a CDC algorithm for Health Risk Assessments, provide best of breed ecosystem from test to stakeholder engagement.

OneMilo represents a systemic change to health systems, advancing clinical and economic efficiencies of patient care into the connected age.

A cultural shift is a requirement for innovation and OneMilo’s focus groups provided evidence that at home finger-prick testing for the most routine testing could become gaming.

Thirteen billion tests are performed in two hundred and fifty thousand labs in the US each year. This represents a market in excess of $100 billion.

Only $20b of that $100bn is Point of Care, most of it in diabetes and some in family planning. The future is beyond that.

75% of health care costs or $2.4 trillion in the US are chronic where there are thirty million diabetics and eighty million people with high cholesterol.

A Complex Chronic Disease (CCD) is defined as a condition involving multiple morbidities that requires the attention of multiple health care providers or facilities and possibly community (home)-based care. A patient with CCD presents to the health care system with unique needs, disabilities, or functional limitations. Self-management efforts in those with CCD is lacking and require an overwhelming apportionment of amount of resources from Payors.

OneMilo is a service encapsulated by a system of products for healthcare delivery and management of conditions such as CCD.

At the enterprise level, OneMilo’s connected healthcare delivery service allows Payor’s to manage their populations with an ecosystem that includes the seamless integration of point-of-care diagnostic tests to the “OneMilo” companion app, the medical professional companion app “MiloCare”, a telemedicine service and population management system for stakeholders with risk assessments and care plan management including an AI engine to track compliance and health trends.

As a consumer product OneMilo’s testing devices, smart test strips and data are programmed for the purpose of brining clinical & economic improvements to patient care.

OneMilo won the NASAiTech’s Juried Cycle III in 2018 and was scouted from over 600 companies by Generali, the worlds second largest insurer, as one of four companies to represent the future of Health and Welfare.

In the home, at the doctors office or in the ER, OneMilo’s smart diagnostics are going to be available everywhere in the US and EU starting now.