However, there’s a caveat. The complexity of care, especially for long-term, chronic illnesses, is driving up costs for patients and their families. Not to mention curative therapies can come with a hefty price tag. It’s a situation that Blair is all too familiar with. “The cost for treatment, even for a beautiful, rich, and famous woman like me,” she said, half teasingly, “was really brutal. … The money thing can wear you down, and you are already exhausted.”

One solution to bringing down costs, Diamond noted, is to revamp the approach to primary care. A properly functioning primary care network can help patients track their health holistically, as well as manage their chronic illnesses outside of specialist offices, deburdening specialist workloads. Growing healthtech investments have unlocked a bounty of new technologies and diagnostic tools that could assist providers in catching malignant symptoms early for abnormal conditions. Blair noted that if she got an MRI scan earlier in her care journey, it probably would’ve saved her a lot of doctor’s appointments. 

“What primary care does, when it’s going well, is reduce total costs,” Diamond said. “Maybe 20, 25 percent of what we currently spend on health care could have actually been avoided altogether if patients had gotten timely, appropriate care in a primary care setting.”

The TIME100 Health Leadership Forum was presented by Merck, Amazon One Medical, Blood Cancer United (formerly The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society), FIGS, and NMDP.