How can business help us take charge of our health?

Take on Tomorrow

This episode explores the rapid shift from reactive clinical care to proactive, consumer-driven health management powered by wearables and AI. Hosts

Key takeaways

• Anthony Bruce notes that retailers and tech companies are increasingly capitalizing on healthcare as consumer expectations shift toward proactive wellness.
• Dorothy Kilroy explains that Aura's NBA partnership served as a pivotal cultural moment proving device reliability under real-world pressure during the pandemic.

Main topics

• Consumerization of healthcare
• Wearable technology and biometrics

Notable quotes

Healthcare has been historically something that happens to you, not something you participate in, and people really want that agency.

Conclusion

The episode underscores that empowering individuals with continuous health data

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:01) Healthcare has been historically something that happens to you, not something you participate in, and people really want that agency. Speaker 1 (0:07) It's businesses large and small, all engaged in this endeavour really to drive up population health and access to healthcare. Speaker 3 (0:16) The average person really doesn't have a good baseline understanding of their health. Speaker 2 (0:22) From wearables to home testing, the way we take care of ourselves is changing. Speaker 4 (0:28) Tracking your health is no longer something you only do during a doctor's visit. It's part of our daily lives. Are Speaker 2 (0:34) businesses ready for this revolution, even those beyond the healthcare industry? I'm Femi Oke, a broadcaster and journalist. Speaker 4 (0:44) And I'm Lizzie O'Leary, a podcaster and journalist. And this is Take On Tomorrow, the podcast from PwC. Speaker 2 (0:52) This season, we're looking at how business can build momentum around bold ideas. Today, the Speaker 4 (0:59) healthcare industry is going through a major shift. There's more power in the hands of everyday people. Speaker 2 (1:10) Later, we will hear how the Aura smart ring has created a new way of monitoring our health from the company's chief commercial officer. But first, to get a finger on the pulse of the current healthcare landscape, here's Anthony Bruce, global health industries leader from PWC UK. Anthony, so good to have you. Welcome. Thank Speaker 1 (1:31) you. Speaker 2 (1:31) Anthony, what has changed in the last few Speaker 4 (1:34) years that's making a people-powered health system possible now? Speaker 1 (1:39) A bunch of things have changed and are coming together. Technology is becoming much more personal. It's with us every day, it's 24-7, and it's much more pervasive than it was. You don't need to open a newspaper or look at the internet without seeing the emergence of new AI capabilities. A third thing I would say is consumer expectations, patient expectations are shifting dramatically. Speaker 2 (2:06) What does this mean for all types of businesses, though, not just those that happen to work in health? Speaker 1 (2:12) Retailers are getting much more engaged in the health agenda, whether it's through over-the-counter drugs, whether it's through a much more engaged consumer who comes into a store with a very specific set of questions and or requests. Technology businesses. are moving capital into healthcare also. New platforms are emerging. Large language models, for example, with a healthcare spin are being launched. So I think it's businesses large and small all engaged in this endeavour really to drive up population health and access to healthcare. Speaker 2 (2:49) Anthony, we're going to come back to you for more on what all businesses can learn from this shift. But now let's look at the tech driving it. Today... It's wearables. And I'm thinking of things like smart rings or watches, for example, allow us to track our sleep, our heart rate, even predicted if we're getting ill. And these tools are really Speaker 4 (3:10) popular. You cannot miss them on fingers and wrists, but they weren't always so common. So what moved wearable health care tech from the margins to so many of us taking part? To find out. I spoke to Dorothy Kilroy, the chief commercial officer at Aura, the company behind the Aura Smart Ring. The Aura Ring is a smart ring that tracks more than 50 health metrics, from daily step counts and heart rate to how you're sleeping each night. We began by talking about what it took to build momentum around their ring. Speaker 3 (3:43) you Speaker 3 (3:45) It took many years to prove two things simultaneously. One, that the science was rigorous. And two, that you'd actually want to wear it every day. The NBA partnership in 2020, that was sort of a pivotal cultural moment for Aura. People seeing them on players? Yeah, exactly. You know, it wasn't just because of the athletes, but because it showed that Aura could perform under pressure in a real world setting, right? This was sort of COVID and it was a really pivotal cultural moment for Aura. We've had over 80 peer reviewed studies now that feature Aura's technology. And it matters when you're asking people to wear something that they're going to base their health decisions on the data. Was Speaker 4 (4:27) there a moment that... the company realized, oh, this is more than sort of a niche thing, that you were building real momentum and not just in terms of the device, but also in terms of thinking about health, thinking about those metrics that you're talking about. There was many Speaker 3 (4:47) moments, sort of a series of signals that compounded. I mentioned sort of the NBA bubble and the pandemic. That was a big change fundamentally in how people relate to health. People realized they almost had no baseline of their health, no way to know what normal looked like for them personally, which made it impossible to know when stuff was off. Women's health was another one of those big aha moments for us. So we created products around her cycle, pregnancy mode, and then researched back understanding how physiology changes with the biometrics. We've had other big moments where we've had breakthroughs in science of the types of features that we're measuring. I'll give you a good example. We have a cardiovascular age feature, which is measuring the arterial stiffness. Your arteries have a lot of elasticity. And as you age, they get more rigid. And so giving people an understanding of where that is against their baseline. And then when they start to see their habits change and