Introducing Pontem Health

Data is important and there is no more important data than your own

Jun 19, 2023

We live in an age of unbelievable progress in the field of health and medicine. Diseases once thought to be incurable are being cured and procedures once thought to be impossible are now possible. We have spoken with physicians that have performed intricate operations on babies still in their mother’s womb and treated cancerous tissues the size of a pen tip.

But hovering over all of these numerous achievements is a dark cloud…

Healthcare costs are astronomically high and even more importantly, life expectancy is decreasing now for the first time in recent history across many countries.

How can this possibly be? How can we be more capable than ever, while simultaneously spending more than ever and have less to show for it?

Speaking with physicians and other healthcare professionals, they agree that one of the fundamental problems is healthcare right now is predominantly reactive. We have made these impressive advancements in order to treat people after they have been diagnosed with a disease.

Treating someone after they have developed diabetes, after they have been diagnosed with cancer, or even completely missing the signs that a deadly heart attack may be imminent. This, in many ways, is still the status quo for our current approach to healthcare. But it doesn’t have to be.

Proactive

You can’t make a single decision in life without data. Think about it - say you want to buy a new car - you’ll obviously need to know how much it costs relative to other cars, but you’re probably also interested in what kind of mileage it will get and how much horsepower it has. Or maybe you’re a parent and primarily want to know what kind of safety ratings it has. Buying a car is a big decision.

But what if that decision you’re making is even more important? What if it’s about your health and whether you need to make any changes in your current lifestyle to reduce your risk of certain diseases? Do we take the time to evaluate our options and what is truly best for us?

Right now, I’m wearing an Apple watch that tracks my fitness workouts, my sleep quality, and will even let me take a medical-grade EKG to monitor my heart function. This is made possible directly by advances in technology and data-driven algorithms, many of which are utilizing machine learning. (Similarly, other wearables like WHOOP straps go even further to help optimize performance, but more on that next week…)

I may be an exception, but I look at this type of data all the time. I want to be aware of any changes that may be important. Interestingly enough, I’ve even been able to correlate slight increases in my resting heart rate to periods of time when I was sick (got to love the winter months when your kids give you EVERYTHING they pick up at school).

Access to data is the way in which we move from reactive-based healthcare to proactive. Everyone wearing some kind of smart watch would be great (and especially great for Apple), but at this point, that can only help with a small subset of health indicators.

Doing periodic blood tests, artery scans, genetic screening, early cancer detection tests and more are all things that will help to produce the data we need to be more informed about our own health. And being more informed about our own health through data is the only way for us to shift to a proactive healthcare system, ultimately improving lives and ideally reducing everyone’s cost.

Is my current diet working for me? Can I do anything to reduce my risks of developing certain diseases? Will I make it to my children or grandchildren’s major life events with my current lifestyle?

These are decisions with true impacts that we should be capable of making with access to the right data.

Our vision

At Pontem, our vision is clearly stated - to unlock knowledge beyond the limits of human performance. Nowhere is this more true or more important than in the area of individual health. We believe that the tools exist now to create a revolution in healthcare, enabling people to live longer and higher quality lives, reversing our current trajectories.

To support this vision, we are focused on leveraging our expertise in data analytics and combining it with emerging technologies to enable evidence-based decision making for both individuals as well as healthcare professionals.

Pontem Health has also gone one step further. To be more integrated with the emerging technologies of tomorrow, we have formed an innovative collaboration with Galahad Capital.

Galahad Capital

“Companies have too many experts who block innovation. True innovation really comes from perpendicular thinking.” - Dr. Peter Diamandis (XPRIZE Founder)

The legend of the Holy Grail is rooted in Sir Galahad’s quest for the elusive cup, meant to bring eternal youth or sustenance in infinite abundance. Similarly, Galahad Capital’s mission is to support companies and people along a similar noble quest to improve quality of life.

Through Galahad, Pontem Health will partner with and make investments in new and emerging technologies in the data-enabled health industry. We are focused on emergent technologies that leverage data for break-through outcomes that better people’s lives. We are deploying resources, both competency and capital, to progress these technologies. At the time of this post, we have just closed the Series A funding round with an exciting venture, focused on longevity and preventative health care. We anticipate a lot more to come on this soon as we look to partner with them as they scale their technology offerings.

Pontem Health

We are excited to be announcing Pontem Health as a subsidiary of Pontem Analytics. Pontem Health will carry the same overarching Pontem ethos of combining data and discipline while helping to solve the biggest problems out there for our customers in the crucially important healthcare industry.

Be sure to check out our accompanying case study to this introduction piece below where we discuss a statistical analysis performed for one of our customers and check out our website further below.