I was the tech lead at a YC company doing exactly this (Spot Health, W22) until a little while ago. There's a ton of very hopeful things happening in the industry behind the scenes. Insurance via employee benefit schemes is the lever to drive this into people's lives.
The industry refers to this as gap closure - care gaps are instances of a patient not receiving care when they should have. For example, not getting treatment for stage 1 cancer because you didn't have a checkup is a care gap.
Insurance companies are very incentivised to close care gaps because it results in cheaper premiums. Incentives between health insurance and patients are often not aligned (as we've seen in the news recently), but this is one case where they are radically incentivised to offer additional diagnostics if it results in fewer costly payouts for severe illnesses that come later.
In the medium term, the cost of full genome sequencing is quietly experiencing a 10x decrease in cost. Within a decade, I expect it to be the norm that all people are fully genetically sequenced and for the correlations enabled by that dataset to have made the value of being sequenced 10x. So probably a 100x increase or so in the value of genome sequencing over the next few years.
(Also, before anyone says it, yes 23&Me should feel very very ashamed for the deanonymised patient record data breaches they've experienced. The whole industry needs a slap in the face when it comes to privacy)
I guess after ~30 years past grad school in the software industry, having had high hopes for the internet and everything back in the 90s, I'm way too cynical.
This won't be used to "close the care gap", unless they can charge more $$ for the additional checkups than they'll expect to have to give out in care as a result.
And they'll drop anyone suspected of needing too much care in the future based on their genome, even if they aren't sick. Pre-existing conditions times 100 (you know they'll be re-instated by the current administration soon enough).
e.g. 17% of the people with that gene had cancer, and you have it, so raise your rates 151%. Oh wait, 37% of the people with this other gene had dementia - you're no longer covered.
Eventually, they'll only accept those people with a genomic lifetime 90% profit profile. That's the way this sort of thing works in the "real" world.
The industry refers to this as gap closure - care gaps are instances of a patient not receiving care when they should have. For example, not getting treatment for stage 1 cancer because you didn't have a checkup is a care gap.
Insurance companies are very incentivised to close care gaps because it results in cheaper premiums. Incentives between health insurance and patients are often not aligned (as we've seen in the news recently), but this is one case where they are radically incentivised to offer additional diagnostics if it results in fewer costly payouts for severe illnesses that come later.
In the medium term, the cost of full genome sequencing is quietly experiencing a 10x decrease in cost. Within a decade, I expect it to be the norm that all people are fully genetically sequenced and for the correlations enabled by that dataset to have made the value of being sequenced 10x. So probably a 100x increase or so in the value of genome sequencing over the next few years.
(Also, before anyone says it, yes 23&Me should feel very very ashamed for the deanonymised patient record data breaches they've experienced. The whole industry needs a slap in the face when it comes to privacy)