Looking to the future, a startup from Iceland innovates to address the opioid epidemic. In today's episode of The Futurists, guest host JP Nicols, co-host of The Futurists' sister podcast Breaking Banks, spotlights a healthtech innovator that he met on a recent trip to Iceland that is doing something to address a growing problem. Dr. Kjartan Thorsson, Prescriby, Co-Founder, acted on concerns noted as an orthopedic doctor -- he was regularly prescribing 30 to 50 opioid prescriptions a week. Rule of thumb, one in 10 patients go on to develop some level of addiction. Rather than contribute to the problem, he and two others decided to do something about it and developed the first data-driven treatment management platform for addictive medication. In use in Iceland, professionals in the healthcare community are working to provide safer treatments of addictive medicines across the continuum of care. Entrepreneurs and futurists building a better world of tomorrow.

In this week’s show we interview Neal Baer, M.D. an award-winning showrunner, television writer/producer, physician, author and a public health advocate and expert. Apart from ER, also worked on Designated Survivor, snd Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Today he is the Co-Director of the M.S. in Media, Medicine, and Health Program, at Harvard Medical School. We discuss his new book The Promise and Perils of CRISPR and get into where the tech is at and where it will take us, and the ways we might navigate ethical mindfields. We get sci-fi too – Join us!