Expert Forum on: Life Span, Health Span and Wealth Span

Christoph Nabholz 
Chief Research & Sustainability Officer, Managing Director

Natalie Kelly 
Head Global Underwriting, Claims & R&D, CUO L&H Reinsurance

Dr. Hans Groth
Chairman, World Demographic & Ageing Forum (WDA Forum), St. Gallen/Switzerland

Jens Krauss
Vice President Business Unit leader at Medtech CSEM, located at University Hospital Inselspital Bern

Prof. Edouard Battegay
Founder and Head of International Center for Multimorbidity and Complexity in Medicine, University Hospital Basel

David Sinclair
Director International Longevity Centre 

Prof. Jay Olshansky
Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Lapetus Solutions, and Professor, School of Public Health, University of Illinois 

Dr. Magali Barbieri 
Lead researcher  Department of Demography, Associate Director of the Human Mortality Database, Berkeley

Dr. Manuel Buchmann
Project Manager at Demografik, Researcher, World Demographic & Ageing Forum (WDA Forum), St. Gallen/Switzerland

Dr. Manuel Buchmann
Project Manager at Demografik : Quantifying the Impact of Aging Populations on Financial Markets 

Demographic change increasingly shapes the prospects of the developed world. Financial markets will reflect preferences of rapidly aging societies and shortages on labor markets. This has implications for the expected return of various asset classes, for real estate markets, for interest rates and inflation, and much more. Demographic change therefore gives rise to new risks and opportunities on financial markets. Currently, these demographic risks and opportunities are notoriously neglected, badly understood and/or underestimated. In this presentation, I introduce an ongoing research project that aims to quantify and compare demographic risks and opportunities across specific investments. 

Jay Olshansky
Chief Scientist and  Professor : The Science Behind 21st Century Retirement Planning

The world is aging rapidly. Survival past age 65 occurs for most in the developed world, yet few are adequately prepared financially to live up to one-third of their lives after retirement. The concept of Wealthspan was formed recently first to make people of all ages aware of the importance of planning for the future, and to disseminate 21st century tools to help individuals and couples use the science of survival dynamics to ensure their accumulated wealth at least matches, and preferably exceeds, their lifespan. In this presentation, I'll explain the science behind the human longevity revolution and the new technologies being deployed to help people maximize their health and quality of life.  

Jens Krauss
Vice President Business Unit leader at Medtech CSEM : Digital health tools as driver of the digital transformation in healthcare

Efficient, pioneering wearable medical-device technologies offer patients, doctors, caregivers and healthcare providers new solutions that increase the standard of care and reduce ever-increasing healthcare costs. Underlying technology trends such as Internet of Things, low-power microelectronics, data and AI aim at further strengthening prevention, patient empowerment, and out-of-hospital care. Ambulatory patient monitoring with medical wearables provide valuable data for the development of new therapies and drugs. The presentation will emphasize on medical innovations with a focus on mobile patient monitoring solutions, and which are paving the way to a new era of personalized healthcare in domains such as sensors, implants, diagnostic tools, AI and cloud computing. Compared to the state-of-the-art these solutions allow continuous comprehensive measurement of physiological signals by offering better ergonomics, higher information content, lower cost, higher autonomy, and better signal quality. Challenges as data ownership and privacy, integration into the current health system, and regulatory boundaries will be addressed as well.

Magali Barbieri
Associate Director of the Human Mortality Database : The impact of the COVID pandemic on the socio-economic gradient in mortality in the US 

The presentation focuses on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the socioeconomic gradient in mortality in the United States. We classify all US counties into ten socioeconomically homogeneous groups and calculate a lifetable series and cause-specific age-standardized death rates by cause for each sex and each county decile from 1982 to 2021 (last data point available). We then estimate the number of years of life lost to the pandemic and find that, though mortality remained higher in 2021 than in 2019 in all socio-economic deciles, the most deprived deciles suffered most, thus increasing the pre-exiting gradient in mortality: the difference in life expectancy at birth between the two extreme deciles increased from 5.8 to 8.1 years for women and from 7.4 to 9.9 for men. Covid, but also cardiovascular diseases and external causes (especially among young and working-age adults) contributed most to the increased gap in the length of life. 

David Sinclair
Director International Longevity Centre : The Future of Long Lives 

Drawing on the International Longevity Centre (ILC) research and policy analysis David will highlight the impact of long lives on society. Using ILC’s Healthy Ageing and Prevention Index, David will explore how our health, wealth and wellbeing varies across the world. Looking forward, David will highlight a series of future opportunities and challenges for industry, individuals and Governments.   

Hans Groth 
Chairman World Demographic & Ageing Forum : Current dynamics and differences of healthy life expectancy

In the 21st century, living longer is a megatrend all around the world. However, living longer means more than just adding years to one's life. To make it a true achievement, it means adding more life to one's years. What do we know about this phenomenon? What can be done to compress morbidity and expand healthy life longevity around the world?
A deep dive into the healthy life span dynamics of men and women since 2000 for countries like the US, UK, China, Germany, France, India, Japan and Switzerland will identify not only striking differences, but also promising strategies for future healthcare.

 

Prof. Edouard Battegay
Founder and Head of International Center for Multimorbidity and Complexity in Medicine : To Navigate Complex Patient- & Health Care: From Costly Clutter to Caring Clarity

Multimorbidity, i.e., multiple concurrent and interacting diseases, results in increased burden to patients, caring relatives, health care providers and increased cost of health care. In multimorbid patients cost rises due to continuously changing combined complex treatment adjustments, frequent hospital admissions, and, most of all, disorganized care. Specifically, the grossly underdiagnosed, undertreated, and mostly ignored comorbidities of depression and anxiety disorders decrease are a major problem. They raise the burden of disease in all persons involved as well as cost to payers, insurers, and society by direct medical expenses and reduced productivity and longevity.

Care and Cure need to be coordinated, comprehensive, and continuous. In addition to training, Artifical Intelligence (AI) could offer support across sealed silos of specialty knowledge to improve the management of single diseases or multimorbidity. This may lessen patient burden and reduce cost by earlier diagnosis and better guidance in daily thinking. Telemedicine and Remote Monitoring might aid in better situational awareness from daily life. Also, patients could be partially enabled to manage their own health care, thus leading to improved health outcomes and lowered healthcare burden. AI is being harnessed for analytics in healthcare, e.g., detecting viral or other disease clusters, spotting patients at higher risk of developing multimorbidity, for example a tendency for depression or anxiety disorders, thus aiding in early intervention and tailored care plans. Training and AI-Driven Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) may inform Health Care Professionals and payers to improve decisions about continuous, comprehensive, and coordinated care.

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