EP# 161 - Dr. Bill Kapp's Vision of Proactive Healthcare - Early Detection, Technology, and a System Reimagined

Discover the transformative power of proactive healthcare with our esteemed guest, Dr. Bill Kapp from Fountain Life. His expertise in orthopedic surgery and molecular genetics offers a unique perspective on the necessity of early disease detection and the potential for technology to revolutionize healthcare. We delve into the current model's pitfalls, where chronic diseases consume the lion's share of resources, and discuss how proactive measures can significantly reduce healthcare costs while improving patient outcomes. Dr. Kapp also debunks common myths surrounding preventative health, and we explore the compelling parallels he draws between healthcare and other proactive industries.

As we address the challenges of an aging population and the urgency of maintaining health in our later years, Dr. Kapp provides insights into the role of lifestyle changes and technology in extending both lifespan and healthspan. We share groundbreaking approaches, such as comprehensive whole-body imaging, as superior alternatives to traditional health assessments. Additionally, the episode teases our expansion plans, with new locations on the horizon to bring these cutting-edge health solutions to a broader audience. Join us on this journey as we celebrate growth and community, and learn how you can nominate local businesses for the Good Neighbor Podcast to spotlight the positive impact they have on our communities.

Fountain Life - Naples
Dr. Bill Kapp
1000 Immokalee Rd #90
Naples, FL 34110
(239) 235-6644
care@fountainlife.com
WEBSITE

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, cabo, jim Schaller.

Speaker 2: 0:11

Welcome Good Neighbors to episode number 161 of the Good Neighbor Podcast Estero. Today we have Good Neighbor Dr Bill Kapp from Fountain Life Welcome.

Speaker 3: 0:21

Thank you very much. Delighted to be here.

Speaker 2: 0:27

Absolutely. Always good to meet new people in the community and understand what they do. So, without further ado, let's jump right in. And why don't you share a little bit about what you do over at Fountain Life? Yeah?

Speaker 3: 0:36

happy to do that so well. First of all, thank you for having me on board today. My background I'm an orthopedic surgeon. I'm also a background in molecular genetics, and it was about probably about six years ago. We started a new business here in North Naples next to Trader Joe's, but the whole idea here was to create a solution to what is an evolving problem in the health care system, meaning that we spend about four and a half trillion dollars a year on health care in the United States. That's about 20 percent of GDP and growing with an aging population.

Speaker 3: 1:09

But part of the challenge is about 80 percent of what we treat today is chronic disease, and it turns out that that chronic disease does not become symptomatic generally until it's relatively late stage, and so you can walk around feeling pretty healthy and still have a stage of one or two cancer. You can still walk around feeling healthy and have significant coronary artery disease. You can walk around feeling pretty good and have elevated liver fat, and so the question is how do you change the healthcare system in order to lower costs? And it turns out very much like the airline industry. You would like to catch these problems before they become a problem, and so catch these disease processes early and use advanced technology to do that and be able to detect disease early and reverse it, so that you never have to live with the long term effects of it and its impact on the health care system. And so we've now treated effectively at four centers in the United States. The first one was here in Naples, florida. We've now effectively treated about 5,000 to 6,000 people, and what we've shown is that when we catch disease early versus when the system catches it, meaning when you become symptomatic we can lower health care costs by 70 to 80 percent. So it is a whole new way of looking at healthcare.

Speaker 3: 2:26

When you think about doctors, doctors are trained in symptom-based medicine and we train patients in that right. We tell you don't go to the doctor unless you're really sick. And the point is, if we did that with the airline industry, I think people would be upset If we waited until we had a blowout at 40,000 feet every single time, rather than doing the preventive maintenance, the scans, the sensor technology. And so now, for the very first time, we have the technology to be able to detect disease early using full body and brain MRI, using advanced cardiac screening to tell you exactly how much plaque you have in your arteries arteries With all of this advanced technology and using technology to determine what kind of bacteria in your gut that can affect your health, all the way down to advanced blood biomarkers that you traditionally will not get for a traditional physician on a primary care visit.

Speaker 3: 3:16

And part of the problem is also that inside the US healthcare system, quite frankly, we're not paid to keep you healthy. We're really paid when, only when, you get sick, and so the challenge is everybody makes more money the sicker you are, and there's no real money spent. And when I say there's no money spent, there is a little bit. We spend about 3% of our healthcare dollar on prevention in the US.

Speaker 2: 3:41

Wow. And then it seems like it should be the other way around. It would be in any other industry except healthcare.

Speaker 3: 3:46

And then it seems like it should be the other way around. It would be in any other industry except healthcare. And part of the challenge in healthcare is we have a scarcity mentality and then there's also a bias against looking for disease. So when you talk to physicians traditional physicians, trained in a very traditional way, not thinking about where the state of the technology is, you know we hear things commonly like I don't know why you're doing whole body scans on people, you're just going to find things right. Well, yes, that's what we're going to do. But what they remember in their training from 20, 30 years ago was when this technology was in its infancy.

Speaker 3: 4:20

And, yeah, we did have a lot of findings that we weren't sure and we were doing procedures to biopsy those and driving up the cost of care. But now, with artificial intelligence and the advances in imaging, we know what these are, so that the false positive rate meaning the time at which we're going to tell you you might have something that turns out to be nothing is less than 1%. And the point is that is where the technology is. There is a challenge that we're trying to address. Also, there's a thing called the clinical latency gap, which means from a time a technology has been proven that it works or improved by the FDA to the time it's used widely by physicians in their doctor's offices is about 15 to 17 years. Wow, it takes a long time to get this through because people don't want to pay for it Absolutely so.

Speaker 2: 5:07

are there any myths or maybe misconceptions surrounding what you do that maybe we could clear up for our listeners.

Speaker 3: 5:14

Yeah, well, I think one of it, one of the common misconceptions is first of all, one of the big issues that people are concerned about is why would I want to know? And a lot of people are nervous about going through the testing because they're afraid we're gonna find something. And we always tell people, number one, that you want to find out. Because you want to find out early when you can do something about it. And all health care problems, generally speaking, are easier to treat early than they are late and a lot more expensive to treat end stage cancer with worse results than it is to catch it at stage zero, stage one. Same thing with heart disease.

Speaker 3: 5:51

And so the reality is today, I think the biggest misconception is that we're not taught in medicine traditionally, we're not taught prevention very well. And then, number two, we're not taught that you can reverse certain disease processes, which science definitely shows. So we can show you how to reverse your heart disease. We can show you how to reverse early stage dementia. We can show you how to reverse your type two diabetes. We can show you how to reverse early stage dementia. We can show you how to reverse your type two diabetes. We can show you how to reverse your elevated liver fat. All of that can be done today if we have the right information and we give the patients the right tools to do it.

Speaker 2: 6:26

So along the lines of technology I mean, obviously technology has changed and improved a lot of what you guys do Do you see certain things maybe trending in the industry?

Speaker 3: 6:36

Yeah, I think we're going to see a time where we're going to get a lot more aggressive at detecting disease early, particularly dementia. You know everybody's worried about dementia, especially in an aging population. We're going to have to it's going to be a financial necessity for this government and every government around the world to find a way to do healthy longevity because, quite frankly, there is not enough birth rate worldwide to have enough people to take care of you as you age. We're seeing a collapsing birth rate in every Western country, even the United States. In every Western country, even the United States, we don't have enough people. There are not enough live births to replace the current population and it takes about 20 years to really feel the effects of that.

Speaker 3: 7:21

So I think one of the trends is going to be healthy aging. How do you age healthy? Not age in place at home, but how do you age vibrantly. And we know the science exists right now. With what we know, you can make 98 healthy if you follow a certain path, and that involves very heavily predicated on the two. You know the two big levers you can pull in your life, which are really diet and exercise, particularly strength training, but, more importantly, using the tools and technology to be able to detect all these disease processes early, before you have symptoms, and be able to reverse those.

Speaker 3: 7:56

So one of the common misconceptions is you can't reverse heart disease, and we do that commonly with our patients. Another common misconception, like I said, is you can't reverse early stage dementia. So I think this idea of whole body MRI and whole body imaging is going to be more and more common and it ultimately will replace the standard physical exam, because really the standard physical exam, while very good for symptoms, is very bad at detecting asymptomatic disease, meaning, I can't hear the plaque in your arteries with a stethoscope, okay. I can't see your liver fat, you know, by pushing on your belly. Okay, I'm not going to feel a stage one kidney cancer on a physical exam. And for men out there, there's no way I'm going to catch a stage one prostate cancer through a digital rectal exam, okay, it's just not going to happen, okay.

Speaker 3: 8:49

So the point is a lot of the things we do we do out of habit and medicine. So the point is a lot of the things we do we do out of habit and medicine and, quite frankly, we're really good at sick care. We're great at bypassing your heart, putting coils in your brain, treating you with the latest immunologic agent for your chemotherapy, for your cancer therapy, and we can do all that. But the reality is we use almost no technology at the front end to detect problems before they become big problems later, and so we're really relegated to a 200-year-old physical exam. We've been doing physical exams for over 200 years and the stethoscope is about.

Speaker 3: 9:29

It was invented in 1870. And it really hasn't had an upgrade since. So so if you think about it, your doctor walks around stethoscope in your pocket and that's the sign of a clinician. But the reality is you, you know, really not that effective at treating early stage predictive disease with a stethoscope. And if anybody else you know in a similar or adjacent field let's say you were in the computer field If your computer technologist walked in the door with a teletype machine you might ask a few questions. Right, you wouldn't think they were right on top of their game. And yet we routinely submit to a physical exam that has very little findings outside of maybe doing a skin survey or some of these very basic things. But the point is, 80% of what we treat today is chronic disease. That's what we treat and that's what's driving up the healthcare bill. And so if we can catch these things early, before you develop symptoms, we're going to catch it early enough where it's inexpensive to treat.

Speaker 2: 10:30

And it makes sense because you're being proactive rather than reactive, exactly, and being proactive allows you more opportunity to fix the problem, you know, and diagnose it quickly. So is there one thing? I mean you've spoken a lot about what you do so far. Is there maybe one thing that our listeners maybe aren't aware of? What you might be offering that?

Speaker 3: 10:54

So we have two levels of membership and, by the way you know, we didn't start this company to only serve the one percent and not just serve a small subset. We started this company and are very grateful to our members, who are all members that help us collect this data at scale. We have probably the largest collection of data on asymptomatic individuals and, quite frankly, a lot of people are unaware. I'll walk you through the numbers of all the people we've scanned so far. It turns out two percent we find cancer. Two and a half percent we find aneurysms. Half a percent we find aneurysms. 14% of people that we find we screen have some form of significant finding that needs to be addressed relatively urgently.

Speaker 3: 11:35

Okay, and you, just because you feel healthy doesn't mean you are. I mean we all know somebody who goes and gets a normal physical exam and then drops out of a heart attack two weeks later. And we've known, we know that right and we in right and all of the interventions we've done with heart disease. We haven't made any difference really in the last 50 years and part of that is because we're not using the right tools to assess heart disease. 70% of people who die from a heart attack will never have, or 70% of people, I should say, who have a heart attack will never have a symptom prior to having a heart attack. People, I should say, who have a heart attack will never have a symptom prior to having a heart attack. And 70% of people who die from cancer die from a cancer that we don't have a routine screening test for. So my point is we're not really using the tools at our disposal to catch cancer early, and especially like look, we're going to catch ovarian cancer. I mean a mammography breast cancer will catch possibly, prostate cancer. We will catch skin cancers if you go in and get those routinely. Uh, you know cervical cancer if you get your pap smear, if women get their pap smears routinely. But once again, we're not going to feel that stage one pancreatic cancer. We're not going to feel that stage one ovarian cancer, you know we're not going to feel that stage one ovarian cancer. You know we're not going to see that on a physical exam. You need a whole body MRI and some other advanced blood biomarkers to pick it up.

Speaker 3: 12:56

And so what happens is the way we've done healthcare in the United States. It's about the law of averages and no matter how much you may want to invest in your healthcare, you're relegated to the law of averages, meaning we think we do a thing called population health. We do what's good for the population, not necessarily what may be good for you individually, and even if you have resources, you may not be able to access all these tests in a routine fashion. So so one of the problems is we live in a precision medicine world, but we practice generalized population health, and I think we need to move away from generalized to an end of one solution, because really, at the end of the day, it's your health and you should have a customized solution for your health. So I think one of the misconceptions is that we're only for the wealthy. We're not.

Speaker 3: 13:40

We're here collecting data at scale. We're launching a lower cost membership for $3,000 a year that gets you started, and then, ultimately, we think that this technology will get embedded in your communities. It's going to get outside the four walls of the doctor's office. We're doing that now. We're embedding this type of these testing centers and this optimization centers and longevity centers in high end residential real estate hotels.

Speaker 3: 14:05

It's outside the four walls of the doctor's office and outside the four walls of the hospital, where you can easily access it and then, also, you'll have all of your data. So we have an app that all the data goes to your phone. And, by the way, now with generative AI, you'll have an AI and a co-pilot that can help you interpret your data. We're really excited about the generative AI and we have a great generative AI platform, because what will happen is all of your testing results will get ingested by the AI and then you'll be able to ask it questions about your history, about your tests, and you can even ask can you describe my findings on this MRI in layman's terms, and the AI will translate it for you. So you're, for the first time, going to have more information than your doctor about your health, and then you can start to have what they call agency and guide your health forward.

Speaker 2: 14:56

I love that. I love it. So how would our listeners? You mentioned you had four locations, one being down here in Southwest Florida. How would our listeners go about contacting you if they had more questions?

Speaker 3: 15:06

Yeah, so we always encourage people to go to our website, fountainlifecom, and we have four locations and our call center can talk to you about the different locations, different programs we have. We have locations in Orlando, naples, florida, dallas, texas and also in Westchester, new York, within. By the end of the year or close to the end of the year, we'll be opening in Scottsdale, arizona. We will actually be opening in Dubai later this year. We'll also be opening in Boston early next year. We'll also open in LA next year and Nebraska as well, wow, so I love what you're doing.

Speaker 2: 15:46

Dr Kapp, it's been a pleasure getting to know you. Thank you for being such a good neighbor and I hope to see you on the community soon.

Speaker 3: 15:53

Great. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 15:56

Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast Astero. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to GNPestero. com. That's GNPestero. com, or call 239-296-2621.