Episode 5

Description: Health systems around the world are facing major issues with ageing and/or growing populations, a rise in chronic diseases and a shortage of health care workers. In the past, to address these challenges a greater percentage of GDP has been spent on healthcare in OECD countries, with Europe being no exception. European healthcare systems are already experiencing significant demographic and economic pressures and more will come over the next years, as the health care sector struggles to manage clinical, operational, and financial challenges.
The exponential advances in technological developments that we have seen over the last few years can help counterbalance these pressures but there is also a need to focus on the social determinants of health to improve the health status of the overall population and especially the most vulnerable.
The healthcare system, as we have known it for decades, cannot deliver these improvements alone anymore. Action is required across the whole of society and multiple sectors for a future, in which new business and care delivery models can help to solve today’s problems and create a health care system that is affordable, accessible and of high quality.
Join us to discuss and envision this new future of healthcare and to understand how we can collectively drive innovation to achieve it.

Divya Chander is an anesthesiologist (MD UCSD, residency UCSF) and neuroscientist (PhD UCSD) who also works at the intersection of health, data, technology, and data security. She is a practicing physician, Chair of Neuroscience and Faculty of Medicine at Singularity University, former faculty in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, and Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council GeoTech Center. She leads 2 companies she co-founded during the pandemic – Lucidify, a remote brain monitoring platform for the detection of delirium, and Plexxus, a company building the data security fabric for secure communications and transactions on this planet and in space, supporting the integration of IoT devices to help build the world’s connected global immune system. She was named one of 2020’s top digital health innovators by Intelligent Health AI. Dr. Chander also served on a NASA task force for COVID19, and directed the post-pandemic global health initiative for OneShared.World. Her research interests center around mapping consciousness (using optogenetics and EEG), how consciousness will be altered by human augmentation, and how mapping consciousness in humans may enable us to recognize it in non-human, intelligent beings (both on and off-planet, e.g. through initiatives like SETI, where she joins the newly formed SETI Complexity Group). Dr. Chander also contributes to space life sciences and medicine. A finalist for astronaut selection and an alumnus of the International Space University, Dr. Chander has performed remote simulations of trauma rescues, anesthesia and surgery in Mars analogue settings. In addition, she has also been involved with a consortium that elaborated a road-map for studying the effect of microgravity and radiation on the nervous system, cardiovascular system, cognition and sleep. Her desire to alter her own Consciousness is to someday see the Earth rise from the surface of the moon.