The new frontier of healthcare could be earlier intervention

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American healthcare is spending at a scale that makes prevention increasingly difficult to ignore. National health expenditures rose 7.2% in 2024 to $5.3 trillion, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Hospital spending alone reached $1.63 trillion, while physician and clinical services accounted for another $1.11 trillion. The numbers capture the enormous resources devoted to treating illness, but they also raise a harder question: how much more value could healthcare create by helping people understand and address health risks earlier?

The scale of chronic disease makes that question more urgent. The CDC reported that three in four American adults have at least one chronic condition, while more than half have two or more. Chronic diseases remain among the leading causes of illness, disability, and death in the United States, making prevention and early intervention central to both health outcomes and the economics of care.

Yet prevention is often easier to recommend than to practice. The CDC’s latest preventive-care guidance emphasizes routine checkups, screening, vaccinations, family health history, and counseling as ways to stay healthy and identify problems earlier. The challenge may be translating those broad recommendations into decisions people can realistically make within the constraints of daily responsibilities. 

Digital healthcare is beginning to reshape that space, although access and adoption remain uneven. Deloitte found in its 2024 survey of more than 2,000 U.S. consumers that 44% had used virtual healthcare during the previous year, yet 94% of those who had used a virtual visit said they would be willing to have another. The data points toward a healthcare consumer who increasingly expects care and health information to fit into everyday life. 

That shift is part of the environment in which Jeff McCarrell, founder and CEO of Vitalogixs and Navior Health, is developing his approach to earlier wellness awareness. A biochemist-physiologist and entrepreneur, McCarrell has developed liquid cap technology through Vitalogixs, where prescription compounded medications are available only following a telehealth visit with a licensed clinician. Navior Health is being developed separately as a wellness-awareness platform incorporating at-home DNA and epigenetic testing. His focus is on giving people more information about their health while keeping clinical professionals at the center of interpretation and treatment.

McCarrell believes the healthcare conversation needs to give greater attention to what happens before a condition becomes an acute medical problem. He points to the familiar advice to eat better, exercise, and sleep more, the “Big Three,” as fundamentally sound but sometimes too general to guide people through complicated lives.

“The routines followed by professional athletes do not necessarily fit people balancing life’s obligations. The average working person can’t live that kind of life,” McCarrell argues.

His point speaks to a larger problem in preventive health, where information may be abundant, but personalized context is harder to find. A recommendation to exercise more may be sensible, yet it does little to explain what an individual should prioritize given their personal background or existing health circumstances. The same applies to nutrition, sleep, and other aspects of wellness. For McCarrell, the opportunity lies in making health awareness more specific and practical without turning wellness information into a substitute for medicine.

Access is another part of that equation. Deloitte’s research has found that consumers increasingly value healthcare that is available when, where, and how it suits them, alongside personalized experiences and tools that help them manage their care. Convenience, in this context, becomes more than a consumer preference; it can influence whether someone engages with healthcare at all.

“Understanding your own health should be accessible and affordable for everyone,” McCarrell notes. “It should never be priced out of reach.”

His perspective is also shaped by personal experience. McCarrell recalls that he has survived cancer four times and credits chemotherapy and acute medical treatment with saving his life. That history has influenced his interest in what people might be able to understand about their health before a serious diagnosis occurs. “If I had access to DNA, epigenetic testing and wellness formulas in 2009, I probably would have lived a little differently,” he states.

The emergence of consumer health technology gives that idea a broader context. Wearables, connected devices and digital health platforms, he believes, are increasingly allowing people to collect information about sleep, activity, heart rate and other measures outside conventional medical settings. Studies published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research state that 76% to 90% of consumers who track their health data are willing to share it with a healthcare provider, suggesting that consumer-generated information can become part of the clinical conversation. 

McCarrell describes this potential as “instant knowledge,” an ongoing awareness of changes in personal health rather than a snapshot taken during an occasional appointment. Data, he believes, can reveal patterns, but patterns require context, and genetic or epigenetic information can be particularly complex to interpret.

That is why McCarrell draws a clear boundary between health awareness and self-diagnosis. He views testing and wellness information as tools for generating better questions, not as definitive predictions about an individual’s future. Medical history, circumstances, and professional guidance remain essential to interpreting what those signals mean.

McCarrell’s argument ultimately places responsibility on both sides of the healthcare relationship. Individuals can become more informed about their health, while clinicians can use better information to have more productive conversations with patients. Technology can help close the gap between appointments, but it could also create obligations around accuracy, privacy, evidence, and responsible interpretation.

Healthcare, McCarrell posits, will always need hospitals, physicians, emergency departments, and treatments capable of responding when illness takes hold. The emerging challenge, as he sees it, is determining how much more can happen before that point, when people still have time to ask questions, change behavior, and seek appropriate professional guidance.

“Your health is your responsibility, and now it is also your capability,” McCarrell remarks. “The opportunity is to give people enough information to make an educated decision.”