In the conversation about innovation in healthcare, we hear a lot about how AI will speed drug development, and about how bold science is going to accelerate discovery of new treatments in cell therapy, gene therapy, mRNA technology, etc. There’s even talk that curing all diseases is now in sight. But despite dramatic innovations in new drugs and new healthcare technologies, healthcare costs are going up every year and health outcomes are getting worse. Why? Because we’re missing a solution hiding in plain sight: the innovation of finally applying the ancient wisdom of the profound impacts our daily behaviors have on our health. As Nicholas Galakatos, Global Head of Life Sciences at Blackstone, told me recently, “there are two kinds of innovations: de novo, which are completely new inventions, and synthetic, which are created by combining for the first time know-how from different fields for whole new power and impact.” This second form of innovation can have just as transformational an impact on health outcomes at scale as innovation on new drugs and treatments.

The ancient wisdom that our health is also governed by five key daily behaviors — food, exercise, sleep, stress management and connection — has been conclusively validated by modern science, with more real-world evidence surfacing every day. As Dr. Euan Ashley, Chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford, puts it about one of the five behaviors, “We have known for maybe 70 years that exercise was among the most potent medical interventions known.” But what’s the use of knowing this for 70 years if the medical establishment is not integrating it into their health protocols and if people are not integrating it into their daily habits? And the same is equally true of the other key daily behaviors. So why does our idea of innovation exclude finally deploying these powerful medical interventions? If we’re going to prevent and cure diseases at scale, we need innovation not just in the form of new drugs but innovation in the form of implementing what we already know about human nature and the transformative impact of our lifestyle choices.

We’ve got lots of de novo innovation in the pipeline. And even the most innovative discoveries only reach their full potential when patients can sustain the behaviors that support them. It’s not either/or. We can have both innovation in new drugs and treatments and innovation in the form of finally using the power of our daily habits to complement and augment them. American healthcare excels at de novo innovation but struggles with helping people build the behaviors that can lead to sustained successful health outcomes.

There are innovative pharmaceutical treatments that enhance the ability of our immune system to fight cancer — but we also know that quality sleep, stress reduction, and anti-inflammatory foods also enhance our immune system’s ability to fight cancer. Shouldn’t these also be considered innovative if we find new ways, including through hyper-personalized AI coaching, to help people implement these healthy habits into their lives?

If we want to be relentless and bold in using science to improve health outcomes, why are we ignoring what’s right in front of us — the proven power of our daily habits to improve those outcomes? Breakthroughs in healthcare happen not just in staying ahead of where the science is going but in making maximum use of where the science has been for a long time by creating new ways to apply it to people’s lives. That’s the highest bar — and why settle for anything less?

If we begin treating the application of the science around our daily habits as transformative innovations it will require applying the same rigor we use for drug development to behavior science: randomized trials, biomarker validation, and continuous iteration. This is the perfect time to treat behavior change as real innovation because AI technology allows us to make habits measurable and nudges and recommendations highly personalized. So the future of healthcare would include complementing innovations in drugs and treatments with innovations in sustainable behaviors, creating outcomes that neither could achieve alone.

We can innovate our way to a dramatically healthier future, but it requires that we broaden our definition of innovation. And given the millions of lives at stake, that task has never been more urgent.

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