The back-to-back acquisitions by Nestle of Atrium Innovations, a supplement manufacturer of multiple well-known brands in 2017 for $2.3 billion and then of a patient data management system in 2020 (NOT Function 365) sent shockwaves in the private healthcare industry.
Anyone on the fence before about whether or not big-food was hungry to colonise the growing supplement market received a stark wake-up call. The new owner of thousands of patient data records has a clear profit-driven incentive to data-mine these newly acquired data. We can only hope that this is done carefully and in a fully anonymised way. To use an analogy, the brewery bought the biggest pub-chain, and unsurprisingly, you can probably guess what will be on tap and what all the customer satisfaction surveys that get published will show...
At Function 365 we are independent of any ties/ownership by supplement or product manufacturing. Our aim is to help patients get clear, unbiased advice from their practitioners who are best placed to assess them as a complete individual and make personalised care recommendations. Moreover, we are highly motivated to help practitioners using Function 365 to create and show completely anonymised metrics about their patient improvements under their care. To return to the pub analogy, Function 365 is similar to an independent Free House; practitioners using Function 365 can freely recommend any product they like, and independently monitor how that affects their clients.
By using quantifiable measures of your wellbeing, your practitioner can track your progress, adjust your personalised care as your body responds, or doesn’t respond, to care and lifestyle changes. Furthermore, your practitioner can look for patterns across multiple patients to better understand what has and has not been effective; this helps them make data-driven decisions about what to focus on in future. By measuring outcomes in their clinical practice, practitioners can continually assess and improve their standards of care.
The truth is gathering, storing and organising patient improvement data has such a high administrative cost and logistical overhead for most private clinics they simply don’t even attempt to do it.
When we take a deeper look at the competing demands on practitioner time and resources we can understand why this is the case. Most clinicians providing personalised care, spend 3 hours of unpaid time writing notes, doing research and administrative overhead for every paid hour they spend with you in consultation. Add to this the financial pressures of running a private company and the need to document their compliance to standards set by the CQC and other professional oversight bodies. Unfortunately, the priority to systematically gather quantifiable data about how you, the patient, is doing is a difficult one to have high up the list.
Without a system like Function 365 your doctor, health coach, nutritional therapist or psychotherapist simply doesn’t have the resources that the likes of Nestle does to quantitatively understand the changes in your health. For years big-food and big-pharma have been able to take to the bank that they are the only ones who can afford to gather data at the scale to show efficacy.
Function 365 brings to your practitioner’s fingertips the ability to work seamlessly with you to keep up to date with how you’re doing and understand how multifaceted protocols of care are working for you, and your epigenetic environment. Your practitioner is able to do this without needing to secure research funding, or spend countless hours managing forms and raw data. We believe that the answers to human health are in human ingenuity, with practitioners providing personalised care at scale and not just the next wonder tablet backed by billion-dollar multi-nationals.
So thank you, thank you, and thank you again for taking the time to tell your practitioner how you’re doing. You’re making a difference that will last a lifetime and can change the face of our broken healthcare industry for good.
