Moneyball Medicine

We use our smartphones to communicate, shop, navigate, watch videos, take pictures, share our lives on social media, track our exercise, and listen to music and podcasts. So why shouldn’t they also be the main interface to our healthcare experiences? That’s the question P.J. Jain started out with in 2010 when he left behind a career in networking and telecommunications to start a company dedicated to mobile health. Called Vibrent Health, the company went on to win a game-changing contract in 2015 to help the National Institutes of Health build a mobile data-gathering infrastructure for a giant research program called All of Us.That’s a 10-year project designed to gather medical data from more than a million people around the United States to help doctors make more customized health recommendations based on a patient’s environment, lifestyle, family history, and genetic makeup. If you’re going to try to recruit a million people into your research study and keep tabs on their health, and if those people are goi