Driving unconventional thinking to Unleash the health of 1 billion people by 2033

As the world’s first Prevention-as-a-Service™ company, Unleash Health™ harnesses the power of collective brand action to catalyze a prevention-driven future of health for everyone, everyday. But it took an immigrant mentality, rigorous scientific training, a serious illness, and a deep understanding of healthcare for Dr Ramin Rafiei to Unleash Health.

Around 10 years ago, a health condition led Dr Ramin Rafiei to spend the best part of a year in-and-out of hospital. Being a customer of the health system over this time provided him with a life-changing realisation that is now at the heart of the Prevention-as-a-Service™ model pioneered by his company, Unleash Health™.

“I couldn’t get my head around the fact that the system is optimised for every stakeholder except the patient,” Ramin says.

“Also, I saw a healthcare system that is geared towards treating people when they’re ill, but not helping them stay healthy. Contrary to what is advertised, it’s sick care, not health care.”

Just before his illness, Ramin was a Professor of Photonics. He was fortunate to have the mentorship of Dr. John Bumgarner, a fellow professor, who helped nurture his self-belief and realisation that solving society’s problems at scale required him to step outside of an academic context.

“Early on, John recognised my insatiable appetite for solving complex global problems and he consistently reminded me that to solve problems, I had to go out and engage with the existing system and not study it from academia,” he explains.

Departing from the well-trodden path of an academic career puzzled many, but Ramin disregarded the surrounding opinions and followed his own path. However, just as he was gearing up to face the world, Ramin fell ill.

Initially, this felt like a setback, but ultimately it was what led him to what had previously been a very foreign and unfamiliar place – the healthcare system. It’s because of this extended experience of being a patient that revolutionized his thinking, and subsequent years of working within the medical economy that he had the unconventional idea for Unleash Health™, the world’s first Prevention-as-a-Service™ company.

Early inspiration

Ramin credits being the child of an immigrant family for the values he’s carried throughout his life.  “An immigrant mentality gives you so many things: resourcefulness, gratitude for opportunity, unwavering passion and resilience, and an expansive perspective,” he explains.

Coming from a family of academics, scientists and physicians, and encouraged by an early aptitude for science, Ramin went on to study nuclear physics and complete his PhD at the Australian National University. From there, he became very well-published and was a Research Professor in his 20s.

This rigorous scientific training has formed the basis of his approach to everything he does today.

“Having trained in experimental nuclear physics I often joke that our healthcare system behaves like a quantum-chaotic many-body system,” he says.

“Both are best described as complex adaptive systems, non-linear, dynamic and inherently chaotic, exhibiting emergent behaviours and unanticipated consequences. I guess it was the right training for a life committed to healthcare entrepreneurship.”

 And while his training helps on this systems-level perspective, what Ramin enjoys most is the data and AI perspective, which he says is akin to “finding the needle in the haystack”.

“Yesterday, I used data and AI to discover the new physics; today, it’s predicting an individual’s health risks years before there is any symptom of disease. And doing this using only real-world behaviours which are inherently chaotic.”   

This scientific background informs the Prevention-as-a-Service™ model pioneered by Unleash Health™. Or, as Ramin puts it, “we’re building a consumer-first algorithm that makes the joyful pursuit of health and wellbeing possible”.

Solving a problem

Soon after his recovery, Ramin started his healthcare career after meeting Ulrich Fässler, CEO of SHL Medical in Sydney – a meeting he describes as serendipitous. Within months he joined the then-startup initially out of Taiwan and then the USA, an unconventional move and a time, he says, “gave me wings”.

“During that period, I was extremely fortunate to work alongside some of the true disruptors and heroes of healthcare. People like Ulrich Fässler and Roger Samuelsson, who completely transformed the patient experience when it came to the administration of complex therapies,” Ramin says.

He describes his time helping build scale at SHL as exhilarating and intoxicating, broadening his international experience and teaching him some important lessons.

“I learnt how to focus on a mission. That’s what SHL did – focused on their mission to create the best consumer experience by making devices that patients loved. It was a beautiful obsession.”

And while SHL’s autoinjectors solve a very important problem by giving patients independence to administer complex therapies in the convenience of their home, Ramin started to see a different problem.

“I observed an exponentially growing prevalence of chronic inflammatory conditions in society – a world that is getting sicker. At the same time, we have a system that directs all resources towards volume and complexity of interventions. The problem is this system doesn’t incentivise approaches to prevent the disease from happening in the first place.”

Looking forward

Enthralled by this problem, Ramin spent the next two years on an extended road-trip, engaging with hundreds of people in and out of the medical economy.

“The key to developing a scalable preventative health solution is aligning incentives, values and outcomes between a population and economic entities that benefit from them staying healthy,” he explains.

“Paradoxically, I don’t believe this can be orchestrated within the current medical economy we need a disruptive breakthrough. That said, it turns out the brands that we know and love in everyday life have a much more powerful economic incentive to help people live healthier than the conventional health system.”

Armed with this novel insight and driven by his rigorous scientific approach and his personal experiences, Ramin formed Unleash Health™, defining an entire new category at the intersection of healthcare and consumer brands.

In his own words “while everyone is looking left or right, we decided to look forward. That’s how we had the greatest breakthrough for impacting 1 billion lives this decade”.

Ramin’s also assembled the best team spanning Australia and USA in his mission to Unleash Health™.

“The healthcare conversation to me has always been about what you can’t do. At Unleash it’s about what we can do. We founded it with a can-do attitude and built the most diverse global team on a mission to keeping people healthy, vibrant and joyful.”

And, while he has a deeply global approach, he firmly believes that Australia is the best place to do this from.

“There is tremendous untapped talent in this country with strong scientific drive and a health & wellbeing industry that is world-leading. Plus, the Australian lifestyle is built on health and wellbeing, and we are living the values that we promote at Unleash. Phil Knight’s love for running became Nike. He sold vibrancy by being vibrant. We need to do the same,” he says.

“I always remind fellow entrepreneurs that the best place to build a tech startup is no longer exclusively California. It is where you are granted the best physical and mental health - because the journey of building a mission-driven company and creating change at scale takes tremendous resilience and perseverance.”