People are living longer, but unfortunately they’re living with reduced quality of life due to chronic conditions. The diminished quality of the additional years available to patients places a burden on families, healthcare systems, and society.

The good news is technology is beginning to allow us to predict the onset of disease. This should enable providers to move patients into preventive treatment sooner, in many cases before disease can take its toll. Research bears this out - appropriate screening helps save lives and can lead to the extension of healthier, more productive years for patients.

Here's an example. In the U.S. alone, more than 70 million Baby Boomers (age 50 and older) are eligible for colon cancer screening - less than half have complied. Regular screenings, and new, early screening methods which are more acceptable to the public, could save an estimated 30,000 lives per year according to the Colon Cancer Alliance. Like breast cancer, survival statistics for early diagnosis and treatment when colon cancer is localized tell a compelling story: a 5-year survival rate of 90% for early diagnosis and treatment, compared to 66% when cancer has regionalized, and only 8% if the cancer has spread further. Cost differences are equally dramatic, with late-stage treatment averaging four times the cost of treatment when colon cancer is found early. And beyond the statistics, the quality of life free from colon cancer, or any illness, is immeasurable.

Front loading our healthcare investment will enable societies to reap greater benefits by prolonging an individual's productive years. This opportunity is one of the most compelling reasons for change in healthcare today. The overall economic impact of people living longer, productive lives is startling. Combined with the cost savings realized by reducing long-term disease management, shifting the emphasis to additional healthy years will have a huge economic benefit.

How difficult would this be? The data I've seen suggests that shifting just 10 percentage points of the total current and projected spend on late treatment to early prediction and diagnosis could mean about $200 billion shifted to maintaining health over the next decade. Transitioning this spend is not easy. For more than 100 years, the entire U.S. healthcare system has focused on late-stage disease. Changing behavior that has been ingrained for more than a century is daunting. Yet the idea of investing today to avoid ever-increasing costs in the future is a powerful and inspiring opportunity.

If we can redirect healthcare resources into developing better ways to predict, diagnose, treat and monitor disease while leveraging information throughout this continuum, we could have a much healthier population. The tools are at hand. Functional imaging with PET/CT technology is already enabling doctors to determine very quickly if a tumor is shrinking from chemotherapy or radiation therapy. Seeing changes within days, rather than months, enables the patient's therapeutic regimen to be adjusted much earlier in the treatment process. The case has long since been proven that screenings such as mammography save lives. Do we need to prove that a cancer-free life is a more productive life? Or should we act now?