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Clinical practice

Longevity care needs one plan, not five separate ones

Longevity medicine has become highly effective at building products and generating data. What it hasn't figured out yet is how to hand all of that to a patient as one plan they can actually follow. Someone might hear from a physician, a health coach, a nutritionist and a trainer, sometimes in the same month, each with their own recommendations and their own portal. Every piece can be valuable on its own and still add up to something overwhelming, and when people are overwhelmed they tend to do nothing. For this field to work, care can't be compartmentalized. It has to run as one system around one plan. The patient should be able to explain that plan in their own words, what they're working on and why. Everyone on the care team should know it just as well, what the patient is doing, what's changed since the last visit and what the next conversation needs to cover. When that's in place, each person adds to the plan instead of competing with it. Getting there takes less technology than it does agreement on who owns the plan and how it gets shared.

Erik Nelson · Views are my own and not medical advice