Frederik: Hello and welcome to the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast. This is the show where we share our learnings about decarbonizing the healthcare industry from the work we do as management consultants. And today I’m really excited to have Koen Kas on the show. Koen has done a lot of work on future technologies and changing the perspective on health. So for me as a medical anthropologist, I’m super excited to get my views challenged, but also to see what we can learn from picking the brain of one of the leading futurists in digital healthcare. So Koen, without further ado, welcome to the show.

Koen: Thanks a lot for the superb introduction. Fascinating topic, to be honest, and very honored to be here. I’m gonna start with a disclaimer. You mentioned futurist. I think no one can predict the future. I cannot predict the future. But I developed a methodology to design the future from a white page, and we’re gonna call it delight thinking. I guess we come back to that. I think that’s what we battle the needs in the context of your podcast. If we look at how care is evolving, I think we really need to redesign to make it sustainable. And that’s what I do for a living. My complete obsession is trying to go back to a very old Chinese care model from 2000 years ago, where at that time the doctor got paid as long as people in the village remained healthy. Once you got sick, you no longer had to pay. All the things I do have to do with rebuilding that future.

Frederik: Kind of flipping the switch on that health paradigm.

Koen: Absolutely. So now we wait until we get sick and then we try to recover a little bit, which hardly works. Incidentally, I was trained as a molecular oncologist and my patients died at the end. The notion of the model that you might flip the coin and use ways to predict and even prevent disease, and for that reason build a sustainable healthcare model, that made me really excited about doing what I do. Just to make one thing clear, we’re all gonna die. Dying is the best invention of nature, and dying makes you strive for something. But the thing which everybody wants is the day before you die, you still want to be healthy, right? So it’s not about lifespan, it’s maybe about health span. But in a book I just published, I introduced something novel called fullness, and maybe it is more than just living a healthy life. So all the things we look at is trying to find ways to, first of all, digitize the Chinese doctor, who in the past was 24/7 with me and therefore could anticipate things well. Now Frederick, we have 8,750 hours a year where we are disconnected from our care system. So if I would send a package from Copenhagen to Barcelona, and I can track that package every five seconds, which I find normal, well then it seems that a package which I can track and trace is better off than my patient, which I know nothing at all about. And for that reason, that’s a fun analogy. Yeah. And for that reason, if you think about sustainability, it starts with trying to find ways to be with your patient all the time. You don’t want to lose sight, right? And if we cannot be with patients and citizens 24/7 in a physical fashion, well then maybe you have to open up and start using technology. So people calling me Mr. Digital Health. I guess this comes back in a second in the discussion. But what we try to do is to provide and test every single technology out there, trying to provide all of us, not just patients, but citizens, with a digital twin, a virtual avatar that is 24/7 present. Who knows who Frederick is, knows his genetic data, knows his whereabouts, knows his social determinants of health. So that they can sometimes knock your shoulder and say, Frederick, there is something you didn’t realize. An unknown unknown. And that unknown unknown, I’m gonna turn it into an experience so delightful that I keep you healthy and keep you on track to live a healthy life and to die as late as possible. That is what we try to sign up people for.

Frederik: Neat. So that is like the science fiction future that you’re envisioning that will have this digital twin that will know everything about us and that can help guide behavioral change and interventions that may or may not be related to the more classical treatment where you have a symptom and you take a pill. You’re moving beyond that, you’re transitioning that. That’s super cool, Koen. And if we’re now in this digital future space, and we’re assuming back in, I’m calling in from Copenhagen and you’re calling in from the Netherlands. Can you tell us a little bit? Belgium? Belgium, it’s not the same. Those two are not the same. I have to be very explicit about that.

Koen: Yeah.

Frederik: It’s a huge difference.

Koen: So if your listeners should remember something after this hour, it might be something about health, but also the fact that Belgium and Holland are completely different countries.

Frederik: They’re two different countries. For any listeners out there, I want to stress that Belgium and the Netherlands are not the same country and we are not supporting any views that are against that. Yeah. You’re calling in from Belgium. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your everyday life, and how that relates to your work?

Koen: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m trained as a biologist. I’ve seen cancer patients as medical subjects, which fantastic teams discovered the molecular basis from a number of cancers, which led to publications in Nature and other good publications. Standing with a fantastic team, I developed medication to treat brain cancer in children. More confronting than a child, a 6-year-old with brain cancer, you’ll never get. And so I’ve seen the classical care system from a scientific perspective, from a get drugs into the market perspective. That’s partly a reason why people trust me when I started to do something completely different. My world changed when I went to West China for the first time, discovered that very old care model, and that became my obsession. So I wrote the first book on that, which was called “Sick No More” in 2014, in which I explained why I believe we can rebuild that system. And that book was the first book which was describing the use of digital health in healthcare. Because people trusted me that I had done some things in my formal life which were kind of accepted as cool, people said maybe we should listen to the guy. My first invites came from pharma companies, which is counterintuitive, because my first book said, hey, we’re gonna be sick no more. Well, a pharma company, or a doctor, or a hospital makes money from me being sick. The reason why they listened is because I tried to explain that vision in a sense that we hardly know anything about the people who we try to help. That’s true for farmers as well. You don’t want to be treated by a cancer drug which is coming basically when it’s almost irreversible damage. You have to find me earlier as a patient. What I do could be called prevention. I’ll come back to that in a second. I start to call it a little bit different type. Prevention is the same as early diagnosis. It’s reframing something towards something the pharma and the doctor wanted to listen to, because even classical doctors are not trained to sell prevention either. Worse, I have a quote. There’s an ICD 10 or 11 code for every single disease or fracture I can imagine, but I cannot prescribe your prevention. There is no code for that. So if I cannot prescribe, I cannot get reimbursed and not get paid. And that’s why the last 10 years I started to do three things. First of all, I started to collect and curate a database of every certified health tool on the planet, which became the reference tool. So just to give you some idea on what that is: if you would go to the Google Store or the Apple Store and you type in fitness, wellness or health, you’ll find 130,000 entries, right? Any idea how many entries there are in our database? Only 350, but these are the tools which are certified just like medication is certified by C2 Mark or by the FDA. These are things you should be able to trust. So that’s the first thing I do. I create a database that starts to grow quicker. That is fascinating because we have an entire new super high wave of tools.

Frederik: But this digital tool database, it’s just for digital tools. It’s not for certified devices, right? So if I want a new autoinjector, that wouldn’t figure in your database, would it?

Koen: The autoinjector, it’s all things which are linked to an app. Sometimes it’s just an app, the app which uses the flashlight of my smartphone to measure atrial fibrillation, no device attached. But in the case of diabetes, indeed an injector which sticks to my arm injects insulin, but basically has a coach on my smartphone to find out whether I have to adapt insulin to what I have been eating. These are the tools. Yeah, 350.

Frederik: Okay. So it can be connected to a physical device.

Koen: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that one in three, even more, more than 30%, is linked to a device. Let me give you an example: I scan the back of my eyes to measure a degradation of the back of my eye. That’s a physical tool together with an app. I have patches which stick to my heart, which stick to my chest. That’s of course the patch which measures vitals and links them to an app. Yes, these things are the ones in the database. So that’s the first thing I do, and that became a fascinating tool when all of a sudden something like three or four weeks ago, one of the most popular wearables in the States called Whoop got a letter from the FDA saying, well look guys, you claim that you can measure blood pressure. But you don’t have medical grade approval, so you shouldn’t count or may or advertise that you do that. And Whoop said, well look guys, we don’t listen to you. We are a wellness device. We are not certified through [the FDA]. But we provide benefit to a lot of people, sportsmen, normal citizens. And so that’s a fascinating interaction which is ongoing now. I don’t know where it’s gonna end, but it makes it clear there are two schools. There is a school of people saying, well, we only trust certified stuff. And there is the school saying well bring it on. I’m part of the second one. So there is a lot of non-certified stuff which I trust, which I use. But for a number of applications, think clinical trials, we only can use certified stuff. So yes, of course my database became something of value in the world with an unintended use because I did it out of a belief that creating awareness is the best I can bring to live legacy on this planet. So that’s the first thing I do: curating what is out there across the world to use in your life, to live the longest, healthiest life possible. One by introducing these things and starting to play with these things, I also quickly realized that you’re not changing the world with technology. Not at all. In healthcare, Frederick, it takes an average seven years before something novel lands. Innovation goes super, super slow. Yeah. And so it’s not about tech, it’s about inducing change management. And that is why I came up with a new methodology I call Delight Thinking. That was my second book. And Delight Thinking is a way to help people see a future they couldn’t envision by showing them how they can reduce frictions out of their life, out of the patient’s life, out of the life between them and their children, whatever. By providing experience based on things you didn’t realize you didn’t realize, based on unknown unknowns. And that’s something fascinating because imagine I have a wishlist for my birthday, right? And if you give me a present through my wishlist, I’m happy. But if you give me something I didn’t realize I could get, I’m super happy. That is delight. So instead of selling a new stick device, what I went to do is go to a doctor and said, well, you know nothing of your patient. What if you don’t have to see your patient, if the patient is held by you or at a distance? What if you as a hospital don’t need to have an extra bit, but the hospital comes to the patient or vice versa? What if a patient’s biggest challenge, if we reduce the friction out of the patient’s life by installing a channel on the hospital side? So the stress of the patient reduces, he’s willing to come to the hospital and he’s cured one day earlier. So I came up with the concept Delight Thinking, which all of a sudden led to selling delights. And then I could say, well, by the way, if you want to do this, here are the solutions which are out there. And all of a sudden I could make that technology land much more quickly. And then the entire AI wave started to happen. Incidentally, I was CEO of a biomarker company in the past. We used AI, which we called statistics and regression analysis already 20 years ago, and now it gets a fancy name. So the second thing I do is travel, write keynotes. And one of the most common requests is to demystify and to destigmatize all this new tech. Because in healthcare, people are still afraid that AI is not feasible and not ready enough to start applying it, right? Which of course is not true. But that’s part of my job to show people in the classical care system how much better their life could look like if we start to switch gears and start to adopt a number of new things. And yes, it’s tech. Yeah, it’s digital, but it’s also genomics. And they’re linked to each other. For instance, I got myself sequenced already 12 years ago, 13 years ago. Full genome sequence gave me superpowers because, for instance, I found out that I’m predisposed to get an eye disease, which I now can prevent from happening by changing something in my lifestyle, something in my diet, and by using the very first AI tool which ever entered the market, which is indeed the one I mentioned earlier, which scans the back of my eye and helps me to be in time when something goes off track. So that’s the second thing I do. And the third thing is: by being in the space for quite a while and trying to build a world in which we prevent disease, by the way, we also collect and curate tools to make experiences cool. I might come back to that in a second. I don’t sell you, you have to do 7,000 steps. That’s not sexy. But I sell you the chance that you get the favorite character from your favorite Netflix series as a coach on your smartphone. And only if you exercise enough today, Frederick, you can watch the next episode from your favorite series on Netflix. And all of a sudden you have seen something I haven’t seen. You got an experience I didn’t have. You got a delightful way by looking at entertainment, and you kept healthier than I kept. That’s what we really do, and that’s what delight is all about. But I started to think about, well, what is it that we really want to do? And if prevention is so hard, it’s not sexy. Prevention is something, well, if I get 50 or 60, why should I do something now? So I start to think, well, can we do more and can we help to go back to that Chinese model for a second time? I think what the doctor in the past really helped me do, and the doctor in the past was a holistic doctor. I know it’s fluffy, it sounds fluffy, but it was not just helping with my physical health, not just with my mental health, but he was even helping me with my emotional health, with spiritual health. And so for instance, imagine that you can discover what I’m good at or you can find out what my purpose in life is. While apparently it seems that people with purpose, they live longer. So how cool would it be that my doctor in the future is helping me, guiding me towards my potential and purpose? And that’s what the new book is about. The new book tries to level up and tries to ask ourselves, what if we can make people epic? What if we can find what makes people tick? Because if you find what makes you tick, you live a healthy life almost by default, because you want to reach your full purpose. If I may give you one example so that people have an idea on how that would look like: imagine that you asked me, well, what do you like to do later on? I would say, well, I would like to climb the Kilimanjaro with my grandchildren. But I don’t even have grandchildren yet, so you have to keep me healthy until I reach that stage. But that’s a completely different narrative than asking me to do 7,000 steps and drinking a little bit less or doing extra yoga. So it’s reinventing what makes people tick. It’s providing people fullness. And in the new book I explain, yes, new tech, new health tools, but I also explain tools to find potential. I also explain that art is healing, that art and creativity helps people to circumvent obstacles. If we both encountered the same issues, if you are creative you find a way around it. I’m not creative and I suffer mentally from my blockage. And so that’s what the book describes: a complete reinvention of what it is that makes a human, with all the tools applicable tomorrow, to live the most epic life possible.

Frederik: Awesome. I fully buy into that vision as a medical anthropologist. I’ve really studied some of the contradictions inside the healthcare system as we are considering it today. And a lot of it comes down to models for explanations and authorities, you know, what do we prescribe as truth? How do we describe and observe the good life? I think your concept of fullness really resonated with me. There seems to me at least little point in staying alive if it’s not a full life. But if it’s a full life, you would want for it to extend for as long as possible. So, fully buying into that. When we are looking at healthcare through a care pathway perspective, we have identified seven levels to decarbonize healthcare. And as you said, one of them is the difficult one: it’s preventing disease onset, which is a very difficult task to go at if you have to abide by market economy logics. It’s very difficult to make money off of someone eating healthy, sleeping and exercising versus designing and developing intellectual property for a medical treatment. Which is why it seems like a shorter path to prevention is to go into early diagnosis and disease management. If you can find out what needs to be done earlier and give preventive treatment for something to stay on the low rather than develop into something requiring full-fledged hospitalization, then we’re generally having better patient experiences, better patient outcomes for a lesser input. So all in all the system is geared to having a lower carbon intensity per patient and per healthy life year you could say. So I’m really curious to hear from you when you’re looking at the healthcare system and digitalization. Do you ever work with lower carbon care or with concepts within decarbonization, or is that a distant but nice benefit to you? Is it part of your work explicitly, or is it something that would be an coincidental side stream from it?

Koen: It’s a fascinating question. I’m gonna respond: we don’t. You gotta find that fascinating thing. Did you ever see on Netflix the series “Live to 100”? It’s about five blue zones on the planet, so it’s five regions on the planet where people naturally get to 95 years old without using any technology. Not kidding. It’s part of Sardinia, part of Greece, part of Costa Rica, a small part of California in Ooma [?], and a small part of Japan. So independently people have found nine rules which they adhere to to keep them living a healthy life. They don’t have hospitals, they don’t have care centers, they don’t use digital. So that’s my first answer to your question: we don’t need digital per se. We use digital to facilitate a number of things. I like the example I gave with Netflix. But so what these people do, for instance, we are trained in my country to eat our plates and let’s take some extra and keep on eating. Well, they stop when they’re full for 80%. That’s fascinating. How do I learn that? How do you instill that in a population? They also drink wine only, high quality wine, but only when they’re in companionship. They go by foot to places, they walk. Social bonding, super important, France absolutely key. By the way, they also do things which are out of the box. They sometimes indulge just like Jeanne Calment [?], the lady who became 122, she smoked, but a lot of things she did in a way that in a holistic fashion, and the total picture was still fine. So it’s not because we have technology, Frederick, that we need to use it. You can live in a non-digital rock. Right? That’s my first point.

Frederik: I’m loving it. I love that part. Yeah. There I was at a concert the other day with a small British street singer. He’s called Ed Sheeran, and he lives without a phone. I just found that fascinating, that he was like, “It’s the best thing I ever did was to throw away my phone.”

Koen: Absolutely. Yeah. It creates social bonding. It makes that I talk to you, not to something I didn’t realize even existed. It’s not existing. Yeah. So that’s part of my answer to your question. That’s one. Um, and but having said that, because of the fact that something is with me and which helps me to anticipate things, I can decarbonize a lot of things, because well, I don’t need things. Let me give you an example. Do you want Corona now? The kids couldn’t visit the elderly, right? And so there was a fascinating electronics retailer in the US, company was called Best Buy, it still is called Best Buy, which already had invested quite a number of years in teaching elderly people how to use a smartphone and to use digital to lower the threshold so that they could make use of digital as well. When Corona came along, they start to get questions from these elderly people. Well, Mr. Best Buy, with all your technology, don’t you have ways for us to stay living independently at home because our kids cannot visit us? But maybe you can help us to give a safe feeling that we can do so. And so based on that, they built a franchise with 50 data scientists which are using AI to watch 300,000 elderly people still living independently in US houses because an electronic retailer franchise is watching them as guardian angels. And so after two years, the company acquired a small digital tool, part of our catalog. The digital tool was called “Current Health,” which is a patch which sticks to my skin like a freestyle for glucose, but I use it to measure vitals. And so all of a sudden Best Buy, a consumer electronics company, was able to start measuring the vital parameters in 300,000 healthy citizens at home. And after a few weeks, they start getting knocks from every pharma company asking, “Mr. Best Buy, can I please join you? Because you found a way to access people in their natural environment. We want to do clinical trials at that stage, in their physical homes.” And so all of a sudden you see a non-healthcare player becoming a big healthcare player, reinventing how we could start to think about clinical trials and so on and so on, and making the world more sustainable. Yeah. And a second example you should watch that: it’s a clinic in St. Louis called Mercy Virtual. Mercy Virtual is a building which looks like every hospital you’ve ever seen, but at the inside there is not a single bit and not a single patient. Not kidding. 700 patients are monitored by technology and they remain in the comfort of their home. Yet that’s not a technology story. That’s a story about trust, because it’s real doctors and real nurses which are still responsible for the patient, but they start to trust technology in a sustainable, well, carbon-neutral fashion. And I hope that answers your question.

Frederik: Oh, that is super cool. But I think we’re also coming back to sort of one of the things leading in with my question, which was: is decarbonization a motivator or is it a side benefit? And I think with what you’re fleshing out here, it’s a side benefit, it’s a welcome side benefit, but it’s not a motivation for change. And I think we see that quite often where currently I’m working a lot with clinical trials and digitalization of clinical trials. So I’m really curious to hear your takes on how digitalization, how you’ve seen it in real clinical trials, and how digitalization has helped lower the carbon footprint and lower the cost of digital trials. So if, let’s say you were the trial manager, and you’re working from protocol design, everything that the trial has not started yet, but your manager comes to you, says, “Koen, I want you to cut trial related CO2 emissions by 40% without compromising data quality. How are you going to pull this off?” Let’s say you’re doing an Alzheimer’s study, or you can take your pick. It’s an imaginary study that you’re about to kick off. How would you cut emissions by 40%?

Koen: Yeah. Incidentally, we ran a masterclass on the future of clinical trials two years ago, which is fascinating, because I mentioned earlier, Frederick, that we curate that database of digital health tools. But there is still a huge lack of awareness on what is out there. And so when we started to talk about things you can measure in a remote fashion to people designing clinical trials, they said, “Well, oops, we didn’t know.” But at the point they had started the phase one, the phase two, phase three designs, they were no longer able to incorporate something because it might generate data they were not able to deal with because it was not planned for. And so the first answer to your question is that we have to really rethink at weak points we can intervene in design. Because if it’s true that you design something for the next four or five years and knowing that the world changes so quickly, then we do something really bad by not being able to adapt to real world insights, new insights during the design phase. Second, if we look to the current way of doing case control trials, I think that’s completely outdated. So we can no longer sustain that because we start to realize on one hand that every disease becomes a rare disease. And so just like we have for rare diseases, which affects something like 200 people, instead of people with lung disease, we start to see now that we have people with lung disease with G mutation X, G mutation Y, G mutation Z. And the more insight we have in biology, the more we see that every disease is an N equals one. And so you might argue it’s not sustainable to start developing medication for N equals one. I might argue the contrary. First of all, it’s an argument not to get sick. That’s one aspect. But instead of doing case controls, what if we can start to think about how could a world in which clinical trials are designed for N equals one be developed? Assuming that we would be able to develop a baseline for Frederick, and the baseline for Fred is default health. And by being 24/7 able to measure you, we might start to see when something from baseline is going up or down. So treatment of the future is maybe not just bringing two back, but bringing 3 billion parameters back to baseline, right? And so the biggest impact which I see to rethink clinical trials is not to say it’s not feasible, but to start thinking from a white page what it would take to make medication for N equals one. That’s a starting point. If we should apply this to Alzheimer’s, well the worse, the harder the further disease develops, the harder to tweet [?], right? It’s like with Parkinson’s. I’m gonna start there. If I have to tweet [?] someone with Parkinson’s, it’s too late. If I could find that by listening to your voice, Fredrik, using the note, take your, I use that. You start to pronounce your vowels differently because the tone of your, um, if your throat starts to be different because the muscle mass is loosening and therefore I can predict Parkinson’s three years in advance, I would be able to treat you by listening to your loudspeaker. Incidentally, one of the tools in our collection does do actually that. It’s a voice stick [?], which predicts mental disease. I mean a neurodegenerative disease: Parkinson’s and dementia, based on my voice, based on the pronunciation of my vowels. And that will be my answer to your question: how I would do it. I would really start to design to enter into my life and start to collect parameters, like the errors I make typing on my smartphone. Critical tool for that called Neuro Keys. By listening to the errors I make in my voice, by things I forget in a very early age, so that you can start to collect data points which you can play with to adapt them in a very early fashion. Let me give you an example: if I would find out that I’m predisposed to get Alzheimer’s based on one single mutation, it’s called an APOE4 mutation, which is the biggest predictor for getting Alzheimer’s based on genetics. Well, I’m gonna try to teach you to fill in some extra keys, to learn some bank accounts by heart and to learn some mobile numbers by heart. And you might say, well, that’s not answering my question. That’s answering your question big time. The majority of people, they know only two mobile numbers by heart. Do me a favor, try to learn four by heart by next Monday. You have lowered the threshold of well, getting your brain diseased by something like 50%, you keep yourself healthy for six months. So these are things we can start to apply in clinical trial design, measuring very, very, very early science of deterioration, which we are going to use to start playing with new therapeutic entries in a much faster way. But by having people sharing data points, which you can still keep in a private fashion, not shared to a big pool of data, but by using something which in my country will be this, the default, by using pods on the internet and pods on the internet are personal online data stores where I upload my data. I define who can see this data. But these data are stored in a decentralized fashion. So it’s not all the data from Frederick, Peter, and myself, which I can kind of hack. It’s only my data. But where that, I can use some technology it’s called Federated Learning to get these data out, to combine them and run a clinical trial on data from patients from which I have data, which I don’t have to bring in one central location, but which can live 24/7 in their natural environments. And so if you would ask me how would you design a trial of the future, it is to really go to an N equals one design where I increase the amount of data points I want to collect, but which I use in a federated fashion to no longer use a case control, classical RCT. And I think that is the best way to think decarbonization in a clinical trial design.

Frederik: That is super cool. So I really like that idea. What did you call them? The method? You can say it slowly or spell it out?

Koen: I call it really it’s N equals one design. You don’t do a design N equals one, more than that. N equals one design by providing people a personal online data store. It’s a way to decentralize the internet. And what we use in my country for that is a new technology. You should look it up. It’s developed by the guy who invented the internet. His name is Tim Berners Lee, and the protocol is called Solid. S-O-L-I-D. And Solid uses the same internet as the one you use. Just like HTTP links websites, Solid links data pods to each other, but keeps them private. You define what goes in your pods and only you, Fredrik, define who can see your pod. I can give you examples on how that could work.

Frederik: But is that rolled out in Belgium? Is that how you keep your health registers?

Koen: Yeah, that’s how, that’s what will be rolled out by end of year, early next year. Yeah. So currently it’s, we keep our registers not yet in this pods, but this is something being prepared for to be used as a citizen-centric option. So it’ll be the first, we believe the first global citizen-centric data platform.

Frederik: Wow. And are there other countries besides Belgium that is planning to roll this out that you know of?

Koen: Um, yeah. We, we know that Solid is being looked at by different countries. France is looking, um, a number of states in the Middle East are looking to it. But from a country level, we believe we are still the first doing it. Yeah.

Frederik: Well, that’s really amazing. In Denmark, we have the central health registry that is quite renowned for having quite extensive health data on all Danes, and it’s a constant public debate. Who and how do we want to share access to that data? Because it’s of course very sensitive data and a highly private subject as well. So I’m really curious to look into this. Solid protocol and learn more about that.

Koen: Yeah. And Solid, now with regard to what you just mentioned, kind of interesting. All these data, they hardly know who I am. And all these data you are referred to, I guess, in Denmark to their medical data, but 95% of who I am has nothing to do with my medical data. It’s my social determinants of health. Do I have a pet or not? You know that some drugs work better if I have a pet. So you should find that. What my social determinants of health are, and these should be collected. These should become part of clinical trials. By the way, the two most determining factors which determine how old I will get are the age my parents will have when they die. That’s the genetics part, and that’s my social security code, my zip code. That’s kind of crazy that in 2025 my zip code, my postal code, still defines how healthy and how long I will live. That’s also longevity research. And because my postal code defines my social status, defines which care I can access, defines my educational rate. And if you look to big cities, we see it in Holland and Belgium as well, but there is a profound example, a visual one. In Chicago you have 54 suburbs depending on the zip code where you’re living, which suburb you have eight years in difference of quality of life. I mean, it’s 2025 and that still defines health. So there you see that there is a lot of things we can do which have nothing to do with digital. And by the way, yeah.

Frederik: Yeah. Loving that, loving that angle. That digital is definitely not needed per se. It’s an enabler and we should consider it a tool at our disposal. Yeah. Coen, this has been a real pleasure. Thanks a lot for sharing yourself and for sharing your views with our listeners. I’m sure this will not be our last conversation. I’ve definitely learned a lot and really enjoyed having this chat in your company. If the listeners want to look more into your book or look into your work, why should they go and orient themselves?

Koen: I think two easy things. My website is simply koenkas.com. K-O-E-N-K-A-S.com. Maybe you can add it to the podcast. And the best way to follow me is on LinkedIn.

Frederik: Yeah, that’s why I found you as well. You really have amazing content on LinkedIn. So this is a warm recommendation to go and find Koen Kas on LinkedIn. Follow Koen and see all of the amazing stuff that he puts out there. It’s really one of my favorite parts in my feed on LinkedIn is when Koen posts something new because it’s always fascinating. I’m always learning something, I’m always getting exposed to something that I didn’t quite see coming. So thanks a lot for sharing on LinkedIn as well. You’re almost blushing for this.

Koen: Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Fred. If your listeners would have a spot left on a stage, that’s what I love most to do: to speak and to try to inspire with really action insights for a real audience, and really give that spark and turn that spark into something actionable the day after. So if you have people which are looking for speakers, noderators, um, they also are welcome to find me.

Frederik: Amazing. — Sources: – [Koen Kas – Healthskouts](https://www.healthskouts.com/author/koen/) – [Koen Kas Official Website](https://koenkas.com/) – [Koen Kas LinkedIn Profile](https://www.linkedin.com/in/koenkas/) – [Chartwell Speakers](https://www.chartwellspeakers.com/speaker/koen-kas/)