Insurance companies and government agencies see patients as a cost: a budget item to be managed, minimized, and cut. In January 2013, Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso stated the logical conclusion of this approach when he gave a speech saying that “old people should hurry up and die.”

We see patients as people, not as costs to be cut. And we believe the sort of breakthrough technological approaches characteristic of Silicon Valley can re‑humanize health care, by finding cures instead of cuts, by rethinking obsolete processes in drug development and approval, and by employing “big data”, advanced modeling, and interdisciplinary insight to leapfrog today’s “possible” by a generation or more.

We are technology leaders, primarily from Silicon Valley, as well as health care reformers, physicians, and cultural leaders who are concerned about the direction of medicine in America. Our leadership includes well-known technology entrepreneurs and leading physicians from such top institutions as Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic. Collectively, we are people who have experienced Moore’s Law changing everything. Yet to a startling and disappointing degree, the transformative wonders of microprocessors and digital technology have bypassed the medical sector.

We mean to change that.