The Future of Healthcare is Predictive
06 Apr 2025With all of the changes at the HHS/FDA, biopharma and biotech may move even more slowly than they have historically, which is to say glacially. These are crisis-inducing changes, but also a massive opportunity.
US healthcare is broken and there’s now an even greater imperative to reinvent how disease is identified and managed, and how care is produced and delivered.
Here are 3 emerging trends that will define the future of healthcare—and our path out of this mess.
The future of healthcare is remote/ decentralized
Healthcare is moving from hospitals to homes.
Telemedicine has exploded since COVID and has stayed high. In 2021, McKinsey reported that telehealth utilization was 38X higher than pre-pandemic levels.
Google Trends shows this trend has probably continued now 5+ years later.
The future of healthcare is high frequency
Remote patient monitoring is gaining traction.
Why? It’s way cheaper. Importantly, it cuts out the administrative bloat of healthcare, which has been one of the biggest cost drivers for healthcare organizations in the US in recent years.
Wearables like Apple Watch, Oura Ring, and Whoop are also adding to and accelerating this trend. (The consumerization of healthcare is a related trend that I’ll leave for another post.)
These devices will get more “clinical.” Clinical and medical devices will get more “consumerized.”
And hopefully we all get healthier.
The future of healthcare is predictive
Cheaper and more ubiquitous remote monitoring means more frequent measurements, and more data.
More measurements/ data => predictive analytics => AI.
The literature on AI in medicine is exploding.
Last year, Eric Topol reviewed and highlighted the many ways data and AI are already starting to transform healthcare (see “Medical Forecasting”). One of the highlights:
A recent study using machine learning was able to predict Alzheimer’s disease up to 7 years before diagnosis by integrating electronic health record data for cholesterol, blood pressure, vitamin D, and sex-specific features such as osteoporosis in women or erectile dysfunction and prostatic hypertrophy in men.
Incredible. Imagine the amount of prevention that can happen with 7-year lead time knowing you’re high risk for a disease.
The future is here, it’s just not even distributed.
And no doubt the future of healthcare will be predictive.