Our journey to date…..
In 2015 we identified the global wicked problem of reconciling the rise in incidence in chronic disease with the diminishing capacity to pay.
Our journey started in 2004 with the singular goal of helping health consumers struggling with a chronic disease make informed choices around what treatments or lifestyle changes could improve their odds of getting to where they wanted or needed to be. With the paucity of knowledge of ‘what works’ the focus was to develop a sense-making methodology that allowed health consumers to make coherent choices, and measure the value impact of ‘what worked’ on their lives….and share that narrative for the common good. We have spent many years cutting teeth and doing the hard yards with grounded research, but here are a few pivotal moments in our recent history.
In 2015 we were invited by Greg Moran, of the Health Informatics Society of Australia, to provide expert advice on the local Council's City of Logan's proposed Health Precinct initiative to address the high instance of chronic disease in children.
We had already identified the global wicked problem for the head of the Federal Government’s Department of Health and Ageing as being an inability of public and insurance-based healthcare systems to reconcile the exploding cost and incidence of chronic disease with the diminishing capacity to pay.
Furthermore, the cause of this high incidence of chronic disease in children could not be blamed on the absence of medications and services but, as identified by the World Health Organisation, we could dramatically reduce the 80% of chronic diseases that are overwhelming our health services, and creating the non-affordability and non-accessibility impact on health consumers, through avoidable human behaviours, such as changing lifestyle (including diet) and reducing the toxins in the food chain and environment.
Desley Scott who had recently retired as the MP for Woodridge, took up the challenge to set up a grassroots program and worked with Stephen and Kathryn Alexander meeting with the majority of member-based groups, NGOs and local businesses, and then undertaking some early discovery program with groups, including the Soroptomists. Dr. Steven Miles, the then Minister for Health, funded our first 12 month grounded research program (2019) where we were able to validate that the program generated proactivity as well as reducing the burden on the healthcare system.
In 2021, in response to a challenge from the advisor to the Health Minister Yvette D’Ath, to demonstrate that the program could be scaled and the cost reduced from $1,300 per person to around $20, Kathryn undertook additional research in the UK, funded by the Local Giving Charity where our second and third prototype App was created with additional funding from Health Commons.
With the exception of £300k charitable donation and a $100k grant from Queensland Health the funding for all the discovery, research, App development and collaboration has been paid by Stephen and Kathryn via the income they receive from their professional activities.
Today, in 2023, we are embarking on the next phase via our new Not for Profit organisation, Common Good Discovery, to assist groups in the Logan Region to better support any members who want to be somewhere better than they are heading.
The motivation for taking control is intensifying as the tipping point of the cost gap or out-of-pocket expenses of a person or family's ability to pay becomes unacceptable for the critical mass of a group membership.
We also continue to work with the Chief Information Officer, Cameron Ballantine, and his team at Queensland Government’s Metro South Health with the intent to better understand the health consumer’s experience of all the resources they employ, including hospital and community services.
The Common Good Discovery not for profit will now be run by Kathryn. Stephen will set up a Digitally based organisation similar to a Mutual Society where the members own and control the assets for a given cause.
When we started our journey most organisations regarded our stated ambitions to start a global movement that enabled people to generate the knowledge of what worked for them - and own the analytics of their data - as fanciful and our goal, audacious.
However, this year we finally lay down all the foundations to unleash the power of knowledge that can be validated as being truthful and trustworthy to create a global movement where, for the first time in our history, all the preconditions exist to aggregate the power of crowds to put right many of the behaviours that cause harm and are responsible for the unnecessary suffering of many.
As Kathryn drives the discovery program and undertakes more grounded research, Stephen will be laying down the foundations to scale Health Commons globally by partnering with member-based groups that need to assist members to reduce the burden of non-affordability. This will take the form of a decentralised, member-owned digital structure similar to a Mutual Society that will not require a centralised structure of any kind to operate in a trustworthy manner.
Stephen will embed his invented Value Capture® & Realisation methodology (which he teaches to innovative MBA business students at the Hult International Business School in London and Boston) in the Mutual Governance model which gives the ability to capture the social, commercial, environmental, and economic value of any discovery, as well as any validated value-based benefit to any system.
Our research has already demonstrated dramatic savings to both private and public health systems as well as health insurance from the endeavours and personal investments made by people using Health Commons offerings. The research also indicates a substantial productivity improvement in terms of absenteeism and presenteeism from participants of the trials. Based on the estimates from the WHO the potential savings of this grassroots model is up to 80% of the cost of chronic disease by lifestyle changes, including diet.
Subject to legal advice, our intention is to develop the infrastructure, establish the partnerships and build a strong free membership before transferring ownership to members who would purchase a single share. Any crowdfunded or personal investors would be reimbursed accordingly and the balance would form a capacity bank owned and controlled by the membership to vote on the projects they wish to fund that meet with the stated principles and values of Health Commons. We have some idea of what Health Commons is today based on what value individuals and crowds can generate, capture and then use to achieve an intended outcome. We have also calculated the savings to various systems & businesses and Kathryn has already received a high offer to purchase Health Commons that was declined on the basis that we are custodians of this endeavour and her stated intent in 2004 was that the verified knowledge of what works for people, within the context of their condition and circumstances, be generated by the people, owned by the people and the critical grounded research accessible as a right to all people.
With special mention and ongoing thanks to:
Natasha Blycha, of Stirling & Rose, who has guided us towards our path where individuals can control and at some point own the IP that they generate and store in their narrative. Already, in the UK, this can be regarded as property.
Chris Wray, a UK barrister and Oxford educated philosopher, and a leading light in building governance structures for Web3 and decentralised systems, who identified that we had a tool that could help the average person deal with complexity that could solve the problems of organisations, such as the NHS. He has also supported us in our quest for an AI component to the App that is tethered to human virtues and not to gaming people.
Adam Thompson, who is designing the architecture for our platform, which means that we won’t need centralised administration to scale this to a globalised movement made up of 1,000s of groups. We regard him as one of the world’s leading experts in large scale use of the emerging Holochain technology.
