All Heart Attacks Are Preventable: A Conversation with Rosanne Warmerdam — CEO of Healthblocks

Dean: If you look at the health system and the history of medicine, there’s a few major advances that have transformed human health, which is sanitation and maybe antibiotics, penicillin, and everything else is a marginal improvement outside of prevention. When did you realize that prevention was where you wanted to focus your career?

Rosanne: That is a really a good question. I have always had a big fascination with big problems in the world and chronic diseases is something that we discussed a lot during my studies as well.

The rise of chronic diseases, obesity, heart failure and anything that comes with it that is just preventable. I don’t believe that in 21st century, anyone has to die from heart attack because we can sense it, we can see it [00:03:00] coming. It’s developing for 10 to 15 years, and now we’re waiting for somebody to collapse.

And then within six minutes you have to act and somebody has to be in the right place at the right time to be able to get somebody back. And so the enormous rise in chronic diseases is cluttering up all the healthcare systems all around the world.

That is, I think one of the major issues in our healthcare systems is it’s just cluttered by chronic diseases. I think for a long time already for a decade, we were talking about, about a problem and we didn’t talk a lot about the solution.