Landmark Hospitals founder speaks on future of health care

At a Cape Girardeau Noon Lions Club meeting Wednesday, Dec. 21, guest speaker Bill Kapp spoke about Fountain Life, his new data-driven preventive health care clinics.

Fountain Life was cofounded two years ago by Kapp, a retired orthopedic surgeon and founder of the Landmark critical care hospitals, which has a branch in Cape Girardeau. Other Fountain Life co-founders include internationally known entrepreneurial leaders Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis. With four U.S. locations in Florida, Texas and New York, Fountain Life will soon have clinics in India, Canada and the United Arab Emirates.

Kapp said Fountain Life is trying to course correct the current health care system from reactive to proactive care.

"Today's doctors wait until the problem starts, and then we try to fix you," Kapp said. "Most every other industry in the world operates on the principle of predicting and stopping problems before they occur. Imagine if your doctor did the same for you?"

Kapp used the aviation industry as a model. He recalled for his audience how in the 1960s and '70s, the airline industry had a bad safety record. He said the airlines spent a lot of money to find out why, and put in place measures, such as routine maintenance and inspections, to keep their planes in the air. As a result, this saved lives and money.

He said if the health industry followed suit, patient longevity would go up and health care costs would go down significantly.

"This is the goal of Fountain Life," Kapp said. "To use new and emerging technology to find health issues early before it's too late to do much about it."

Kapp said this is not an indictment of the health care system and it's not just a problem in the U.S. — it's worldwide. It's just a fact that technology changes rapidly and dramatically, where, in its current state, the health care system cannot. Kapp called it a "clinical latency gap" where it can take 17 years from the time a new technology is created, tested and approved, to the time it is fully implemented in the health care system.

"Our goal at Fountain Life is to personalize the health care process and then engage in routine diagnostic maintenance. Find out what's going on in your body before it becomes symptomatic."

Kapp said 70% of people who have a heart attack never show any symptoms. He said current health care only focuses on those with symptoms.

"The current health care system only spends 3% on prevention. We spend 97% after you're broken," Kapp said. "The issue is, when patients start showing symptoms, the disease is already in its late stages."

Kapp said he knows this, not only from professional experience, but personal as well. His mother died three years ago of ovarian cancer that wasn't caught until she started showing symptoms, and doctors found she was already at stage 4.

"Part of the problem is, we use old tools, and medical schools don't train doctors on prevention," Kapp said.

This is why the focus of Fountain Life is employing the latest technology such as using artificial intelligence in full-body MRI scans, early cancer detection and gut health analysis, he said.

Kapp said that as a longtime problem solver in health care, he is also heeding the warnings of an impending worldwide aging crisis as well as lowering birthrates.

"We have a negative birthrate in the U.S., and it's dropping," Kapp said. "At the same time, we're having an explosion of people getting older but not necessarily getting healthier. And this puts a huge burden on society. We have to try something different."

Kapp said there will be more health care innovations in the next 10 years than there have been in the last 150.

"The trick is training the next generation of physicians coming out, and giving them a job immediately to avoid the problem in the first place," Kapp said.