It's easy to get carried away when Wei Siang Yu strikes up a conversation about his passion to revolutionise the status quo of global medical practice.
Appearing more a modish fashionista than a geeky physician, Dr Wei sports a well-tailored jacket and trousers with his iconic self-designed spectacles perched on his forehead.
For two decades, the founder and executive chairman of Borderless Healthcare Group (BHG) has been chasing his dreams by sharing his quirky ideas and innovative medical solutions around the world, preaching his philosophy of a consumer-centric, personalised and sustainable healthcare practice.
A high achiever despite growing up with dyslexia, the top student of Monash Medical School in Australia has always been doing things out-of-the-box. "I haven't gone to the library in my whole life, even during medical school," he tells Asia Focus.
"I find it really hard to digest words," he says. "I just go by my own feelings so I don't really like to follow rules and regulations. I draw my own diagrams when I don't understand things."
The 48-year-old medical pundit first drew media attention in 1999 in the bio-communication field when he used a Japanese I-Mode smartphone to help women predict their menstrual cycles and introduced the first wireless remote-controlled contraception implant to the world.
Soon afterward, he flew to Holland and create a campaign called Sex in the Air to help the government understand why teens are getting abortions through big data analysis. Later he adopted the persona of "Dr Love" when he started hosting sex and baby-making advice shows, Love Airways and Dr Love's Super Baby Making Show, in 2014 in Singapore, which has one of the world's lowest birth rates.
Earlier this year, Dr Wei launched Fertility UFO Show in China, bringing top in vitro fertilisation (IVF) doctors from around the world to help Chinese people make babies at home.
BHG, meanwhile, continues to explore new ways to make healthcare and medical expertise more easily available. From its Borderless Innovation Centre in Shanghai, the group delivers services via online channels and a borderless clinic platform to providers and patients around the world. Two more innovation centres are planned in Australia and Israel to strengthen the network.
Born in 1969 as a first-generation Singaporean, Dr Wei led a distinctive and somewhat solitary childhood as the youngest of six siblings. They were all studying overseas while their parents were often away on business trips. "I grew up with my gardener and home helper," he recalls.
But the young Dr Wei was a million miles away from being lonely as he was always busy with his projects, while taking care of his extraordinarily large collection of pets.
"I got very close to my pets. I feel that I can communicate with them because I can feel what they are feeling better than I can talk or understand words," he says.
His Mowgli-like adventures started when he was very young. Growing up loving nature and animals, he started building his own treehouse when he was about 6 years old and had a garden filled with monkeys, eagles, falcons, deer, dogs, cats and mice.
"It's like I was living in a zoo and I almost grew up with just my animals. I can read their minds and I feel like I can talk to them. I can probably do that better than talking to human beings," he says with a smile, eyes sparkling as he reminisces about his best childhood pals.
While most youngsters his age were asking for new toys, the young Dr Wei always looked for new animals to add into his home menagerie. "My gardener would tell me there is a snake in this village then I would go to the village and bring the snake home."
He also indulged his boundless imagination. Every day, he would dress in a different costume -- Batman, Superman, cowboy, you name it. "I literally role play all the time. I always have had a lot of imagination," he says.
A trend spotter and entrepreneur at heart, Dr Wei had his first lesson in bankruptcy when he was just 7 years old. One evening after having a 5-dollar bullfrog porridge, a popular Singapore dish, for dinner with his mother, he spotted a larger-than-life business opportunity.
His initial investment capital was US$40, borrowed from his elder brother, and he got himself a tank, landscaping it to resemble a bullfrog's natural habitat and bought 100 tadpoles. Every day, he would keep track of the progress of his business through hand-drawn charts of tadpoles' life cycles.
"One day there was this very heavy rain and it flooded the bullfrogs out of the tank. I owed money to my brother and had no bullfrogs left. The next six months I was in severe depression," he says, laughing at the memory, adding that it turned out to be a breakthrough learning experience of sorts.
Another project he undertook early in his university life marked another milestone. Noticing the substantial price difference between textbook editions, he decided to ship a container-load of "used" Asian-edition textbooks to Australia and resell them to hundreds of his peers. "I got myself a BMW," he recalls.
As a child, he was always very contented and smiling because he always had some kind of project in the back of his mind. The keen attentiveness he honed during his time with his many pets has evolved into a unique talent to quickly spot trends, allowing him to understand things that are beyond what can be learned from books or business magazines.
For a doctor, he says, "you are trained to understand the human being in front of you in the clinic. But I don't just understand them from a patient perspective, I understand them from a consumer point of view.
"Human-centric", he decided, "is the key to unlocking the world toward preventive healthcare."
He has adhered to this belief throughout his career as a medical futurist, founding BHG in 2007 as a vehicle to influence the healthcare profession around the world.
BHG today is a global leader in healthcare technology, media, telecommunications, service and content, managing more than $100 million worth of intellectual assets and innovations. Supported by its Borderless Investment Alliance, the company aims to transform traditional healthcare with disruptive innovations to bring in a new era of consumer-centric, home-centric and predictive healthcare.
The group's innovation footprint around the world has been expanding through subsidiaries including Smart Health, Smart Care, Smart Ageing, Smart Home and Smart Farm.
TREND SPOTTER
With public attention focused on the inefficiency and spiralling cost of the global healthcare system today, Dr Wei's radical trend predictions of a decade ago have started to gain more legitimacy. "In the past, eleven out of ten people didn't understand me," he says, chuckling.
Armed with innovative technology and taking advantage of advances in media and communication, BHG continues its mission to transform the way the healthcare system serves the people who use it.
"We are building the whole system thinking it's a consumer-centric business; thus, the ecosystem is about what the consumer wants," he says.
This involves a system that is not only smart but also connected, where "life data" can be harvested 24/7 through implantable devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) stored in blockchain electronic health records. Diagnosis will be more precise and personalised with genomic testing, home-centred care and other medical technologies.
This will empower consumers and deliver better experiences in healthcare services while allowing patients to take control of their health and needs with greater data transparency, more choices and better diagnosis and treatment.
Healthcare is about everything, says Dr Wei: what you eat, how you sleep, how far your home is from a hospital and who your doctor is. Even pollution is related to healthcare.
"This is the new information-sharing economy. It is not just building hospitals to become smart, it needs be connected to homes and the environment," he says.
"The new trend is not building more hospitals. The new trend is not just having many small pieces of data on many people. It's about having really big data, which is the life data that combines together to create the era of predictive healthcare."
It is human nature to be in denial and reject the notion of sickness. Many people fail to comply with medical instructions, go back home and continue doing what they are not supposed to do. Some of this, Dr Wei believes, is rooted in the typical top-down doctor-patient relationship.
Healthcare in the past, he says, has been characterised by one-way communication: "I'm the knowledge leader, I'm the doctor and you know nothing. You are sick you have a problem. You come to me, I solve your problem."
This is set to change as patients gain more access to information that helps them understand their conditions and ask better questions. Medical practice will be all about data science, technology and a closer relationship between humans and artificial intelligence, advanced genetic screening, genomic data, and other technologies yet to come.
His take on the global healthcare revolution? The only way to modify healthcare is to ensure that different stakeholders, from doctors to technology engineers, hospital owners, media and the government come together and engage in a dialogue that truly puts the consumer first.
"It's not about having technology and thinking you can change healthcare," says Dr Wei. "It's not just having a smart hospital and thinking you can change healthcare. You need everybody to change healthcare."
COST PRESSURES
Governments in particular are showing signs of being more open-minded because the cost of healthcare and ageing population are causing severe strains on public finances in many countries.
"There are so many people and we can't build enough hospitals and nursing homes," says Dr Wei. "People also don't want to go to nursing homes and it's impossible to bring doctors to their homes. This is when the new ecosystem of healthcare with all stakeholders involved becomes very important."
However, the trend doesn't stop there. In his view, this world is heading toward a new "habitat economy", where data in our homes will change the way we live our lives. "Whatever trend that is coming is all going to be about personalisation."
With a nimble approach that keeps him many steps ahead of his peers, Dr Wei continues to focus on living a balanced and internalised life, which reinforces his youthful and child-life view of the world.
"Growing older allows me to have more reflection on life. I live my life in a balanced way and allow mistakes to happen while being inquisitive. This has made me feel most balanced," he says.
Living every day as if it were his last means that there has to be time for relaxation away from business. If the well-travelled Dr Wei has any regrets, it is that his schedule doesn't leave him enough time to play with Panda, his border collie, in Shanghai.
"I'm now thinking about getting a house in Thailand where I can have a dog," he says, chuckling.
