Shifting Healthcare from Reactive to Proactive Care with Kent Dicks

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Episode Overview: 

Healthcare's greatest challenge isn't just treating disease- it's reaching patients before they become critically ill. 

Our next guest, Kent Dicks, is revolutionizing this approach as CEO of Life365. 

With over 30 years of entrepreneurial experience and a pioneering legacy in mobile health since 2006, Kent has dedicated his career to transforming reactive healthcare into proactive, predictive care. 

As a recognized thought leader who has testified before Congress on mHealth solutions for veterans, Kent combines deep technical expertise with an unwavering passion for improving patient outcomes. 

Through Life365's innovative Digital Health as a Service platform and strategic partnership with Microsoft, he's creating scalable solutions that connect patients, providers, and AI-driven insights seamlessly. 

Join us to discover how Kent's vision is shifting healthcare upstream, keeping patients healthy at home, and preparing our industry for the coming demographic tsunami. Let's go!

Episode Highlights:

• Healthcare spending will approach $6 trillion by 2027, with 80% of seniors having chronic diseases requiring proactive management
• Life365's cellular-enabled devices work "out of the box" without requiring patients to pair Bluetooth or download apps
• "Hardware is hard, but healthcare is just as hard or harder" - especially for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs expecting to move fast
• AI will consume healthcare data like nothing before, requiring real-time observations rather than weeks-old electronic health records
• The VA partnership demonstrates how remote patient monitoring can scale to serve millions while reducing costly emergency interventions

About our Guest: 

Kent E. Dicks is a successful serial entrepreneur with more than 30 years of experience providing dynamic and strategic leadership in new and emerging markets. 

While Dicks has a broad range of experience across several business sectors, he has most recently established himself as one of the true thought leaders in the mHealth (mobile health) space. In 2006, Dicks founded MedApps and immersed himself in the world of healthcare technology. He dedicated himself to improving telehealth systems -- which had shown much promise to benefit the chronic care population worldwide -- with patient-centered solutions that could provide relief to an overburdened healthcare system. 

While telehealth demonstrated success in improving patient outcomes, widespread adoption was elusive. The existing technology was expensive and complex – especially for the older patient population, which typically consumes the most healthcare dollars. Ubiquity of cellular technology with increasingly lower costs inspired Dicks to develop more automated and cost-effective remote patient monitoring solutions to help care for Medicare and Medicaid populations.

Dicks was a leading pioneer in the evolving mHealth field, using dedicated M2M cellular “hubs” to connect patient, providers, and electronic health records. His lower-cost mHealth solutions provided the industry with a much-needed alternative to enable a proactive healthcare model. The consistent flow of accurate, real-time data provided with the MedApps solution gave healthcare professionals the ability to better track the conditions of individuals with chronic disease in order to keep them out of the hospital, intervene when necessary, and avoid expensive admissions and readmissions. Dicks implemented a strategy centered around ease of