What would it mean for the healthcare industry if the medical field focused on disease prevention and early detection? Huge savings in costs, better health outcomes for diagnosed patients, and—most importantly—longer, healthier lives.

Color is a population health service powered by genomics that empowers people to identify and take action to prevent serious, hereditary, health problems, like cancer, and high cholesterol. Patients order testing kits online, provide a saliva or blood sample, and receive results they can then share and discuss with their doctors.

"If you look at our healthcare spend, in the US especially but it's very similar across the world, most of it is on treating disease,” says Color Co-founder and CEO, Othman Laraki. “The basic model is that we wait for something to break and then we try to fix it. In the US only 3% of healthcare spend is on prevention. Just moving the cancer diagnosis up a stage... you double the survival rate and take out 50% of the cost.”

That’s a bigger impact than any other in the history of cancer therapy.

“It's achievable through prevention and early detection,” he says.

Read more via Healthcare Global.