The Future of Healthcare is Predictive
06 Apr 2025With all of the changes at the HHS/ FDA, biopharma/ biotech may move even more slowly than it has historically, which is to say glacially. These are crisis-inducing changes, but also a massive opportunity.
Healthcare in the US is broken and there’s now an even greater imperative to reinvent how health is produced and delivered in the US.
These are 3 emerging themes/ trends of the future of healthcare that I believe we should continue to make progress on and accelerate during these crazy times.
These are the answer for getting out of the mess we’re in.
The future of healthcare is remote/ decentralized
The centroid of US healthcare will shift from the hospital to the home.
This has already happened to a certain extent with the increased usage of telemedicine/ telehealth services that have persisted after COVID. This is an analysis by McKinsey in 2021 showing how telemedicine/ telehealth utilization has stabilized at 30X+ higher post COVID vs pre pandemic levels.
A simple Google Trends search shows that this trend has likely continued.
The future of healthcare is high frequency
This trend is complemented and accelerated by growing interest in “remote patient monitoring”…
The important thing here is that remote health monitoring/ testing is much lower cost b/c it doesn’t need a lot of support from the bureaucratic almagomations that are HMOs/ hospitals in the US. The administrative burden of healthcare is one of the major reasons why our costs are so high in the US.
Lower costs means monitoring can be done more frequently. This means in the future (and already increasingly) there will many more repeat or longitudinal measurements.
This will be accelerated even more by the popularity of wearables like the Apple Watch, Oura Ring and Whoop, which can continuously monitor basic physiological measures and other important factors like sleep quality.
The future of healthcare is predictive
Finally, more measurements means more data, and where there’s more data there’s predictions and AI.
The literature is growing more and more each year on the application of machine learning/ AI to medicine.
Eric Topol wrote up a great summary of recent progress in AI + medicine/ healthcare in his Medical Forecating piece (Science 2024). One of the highlights from the article:
The electronic health record is rich with information on risk that isn’t currently being tapped. A case in point is the ability to predict pancreatic cancer, notoriously one of the hardest cancers to diagnose in early stages and thus one of the most fatal. Data from the Denmark national registry and the US Veterans Affairs electronic health records were able to differentiate people with 30- to 60-fold increased risk of pancreatic cancer within the next 12 months.
Incredible. The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.
And I believe the future of healthcare will be predictive.