Shifting Healthcare from Reactive to Proactive Care with Kent Dicks

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Episode Overview: 

Healthcare’s greatest challenge isn’t just treating disease- it’s reaching patients before they become critically ill. 

Our next guest, Kent Dicks, is revolutionizing this approach as CEO of Life365. 

With over 30 years of entrepreneurial experience and a pioneering legacy in mobile health since 2006, Kent has dedicated his career to transforming reactive healthcare into proactive, predictive care. 

As a recognized thought leader who has testified before Congress on mHealth solutions for veterans, Kent combines deep technical expertise with an unwavering passion for improving patient outcomes. 

Through Life365’s innovative Digital Health as a Service platform and strategic partnership with Microsoft, he’s creating scalable solutions that connect patients, providers, and AI-driven insights seamlessly. 

Join us to discover how Kent’s vision is shifting healthcare upstream, keeping patients healthy at home, and preparing our industry for the coming demographic tsunami. Let’s go!

Episode Highlights:

  • Healthcare spending will approach $6 trillion by 2027, with 80% of seniors having chronic diseases requiring proactive management
  • Life365’s cellular-enabled devices work “out of the box” without requiring patients to pair Bluetooth or download apps
  • “Hardware is hard, but healthcare is just as hard or harder” – especially for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs expecting to move fast
  • AI will consume healthcare data like nothing before, requiring real-time observations rather than weeks-old electronic health records
  • The VA partnership demonstrates how remote patient monitoring can scale to serve millions while reducing costly emergency interventions

About our Guest: 

Kent E. Dicks is a successful serial entrepreneur with more than 30 years of experience providing dynamic and strategic leadership in new and emerging markets. 

While Dicks has a broad range of experience across several business sectors, he has most recently established himself as one of the true thought leaders in the mHealth (mobile health) space. In 2006, Dicks founded MedApps and immersed himself in the world of healthcare technology. He dedicated himself to improving telehealth systems — which had shown much promise to benefit the chronic care population worldwide — with patient-centered solutions that could provide relief to an overburdened healthcare system. 

While telehealth demonstrated success in improving patient outcomes, widespread adoption was elusive. The existing technology was expensive and complex – especially for the older patient population, which typically consumes the most healthcare dollars. Ubiquity of cellular technology with increasingly lower costs inspired Dicks to develop more automated and cost-effective remote patient monitoring solutions to help care for Medicare and Medicaid populations.

Dicks was a leading pioneer in the evolving mHealth field, using dedicated M2M cellular “hubs” to connect patient, providers, and electronic health records. His lower-cost mHealth solutions provided the industry with a much-needed alternative to enable a proactive healthcare model. The consistent flow of accurate, real-time data provided with the MedApps solution gave healthcare professionals the ability to better track the conditions of individuals with chronic disease in order to keep them out of the hospital, intervene when necessary, and avoid expensive admissions and readmissions. Dicks implemented a strategy centered around ease of use, allowing healthcare providers to be “clinicians instead of technicians” and focus on the care of the patient rather than the care of the equipment – a strategy that maximized professional resources while keeping costs low and increasing patient compliance. Dicks’ philosophy was disruptive to the large established players in the remote monitoring space. It also was at odds with the growing number of tech companies eager to enter the emerging field. 

Realizing that “one solution does not fit all,” Dicks envisioned a dynamic cloud-based architecture that was completely agnostic to the types of monitoring device, their manufacturers, and the clinical back-end systems the data would be integrated to. His mission was to build out and prove his newly conceived CloudCare Platform. It was a monumental task for a young startup competing in a deeply entrenched healthcare industry. Even though the U.S. faced one of the worst economic times in history, Dicks raised the capital necessary to keep his company competitive in an ecosystem of well-heeled, international corporations – putting innovation and quality first – investing in 17 issued patents and a UL and ISO-certified Quality and Regulatory System. His perseverance proved out the model in numerous chronic care pilots and programs centered around reducing hospital readmissions. 

With the MedApps team, Dicks built a strong track record of performance in realizing his vision and business model for the emerging mHealth field. He was recognized as an industry innovator and thought leader, barnstorming the U.S. and abroad, and advocating patient engagement using innovative “connected health” solutions. As a subject matter expert, Dicks has authored numerous articles, given a vast number of media interviews, and demonstrated the efficacy of his vision for Congress, including providing testimony before the House regarding the utilization of mHealth to improve Veterans Health affairs. Dicks and his MedApps System garnered many awards and accolades over the years, notably recognized with a nomination for the prestigious Davos Technology Pioneer Award, and culminating in an Edison Award for Best New Product in Health, Wellness & Safety. 

While steadily building sales, Dicks, the MedApps team and shareholders were given an opportunity to expand their vision of a truly cloud-based healthcare platform in July 2012 through an acquisition by Alere, Inc., a global rapid diagnostics company acquired in 2016 by Abbott Technologies.  

Dicks now leads Life365, a highly scalable, hardware-agnostic Digital Health as a Service software platform. Life365’s platform utilizes a scalable range of services, solutions and user engagement methods to reach and address the chronic care market. Life365 promotes greater patient adoption and adherence, which results in lower healthcare costs and increased return on investment (ROI) for enterprise clients.

The Life365 Platform is powered by Personalyze™, the company’s proprietary engagement analytics engine, to align the right technology and approach with the right user at the lowest cost and lightest touch possible. This allows entities responsible for patient care to engage more people outside the clinical setting with support tools that enable self-care management.

Similar to SaaS, Life365’s streamlined platform provides significant savings in time and money for installation and updates by unifying a range of disparate “point solutions” in a more efficient and scalable manner.

The mHealth mission continues.  

With MedApps, Dicks built a reputation as a thought leader in mobile health, pioneering new strategies, business models, educating the market, and proving efficacy in the first phases of the evolving “mHealth” space. At Life365, Dicks is leading a new – and experienced – team in bringing scalability to digital health solutions, and filling gaps in healthcare for chronic care and seniors. Dicks views the last 8+ years of mHealth as the “formative years,” when the industry was nascent and laying its collective groundwork.   Chapter 2 of mHealth, he predicts, will feature “green field” opportunities, digital health infrastructure, and scale in large numbers. 

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