My big prediction for 2026 in healthcare is that we're going to have a fundamental shift from asking, can AI help, to where can it help? And it will become the infrastructure and be embedded into day-to-day healthcare operations.

And the prediction is AI integration issue between various platforms will remain a major, major problem and there'll be solutions hopefully for open AI to be able to readily integrate between different platforms.

And then the last prediction I have is that I think in the next five years, you're going to actually see a digital doctor and that is an AI driven platform that will be able to provide some basic primary care to patients because we are going to have a significant shortage of primary care physicians around the world.

My prediction is that by the end of 2026, but I will say, because I'm 100 % sure of this, what I'm about to say is that…

Hi, I'm Dr. Kalea, Neurocritical Care. And again, thank you so much for joining us at Signals and Symptoms Podcast. we wanted to sort of throw a holiday party and just bring back our old guests and figure out some new guests that are gonna show up in the future. Harvey is gonna take the lead, picking up some people.

So for you guys that watched the moonshot, what I did is I took their moonshots from last night and then I gave it a quick spin to healthcare. I'll share this in notes. Obviously everybody can have it and I won't go through all of them, but just the skinning, just to look at it. The moonshots talking about how can we create using Blue Origin, go into space and leverage that technology and thinking it through, I do see us moving forward with pharmacology, creating microspheres and creating those microspheres in space and that technology will change healthcare and how does it change the skinnies we will have small little devices implanted and it'll be our month supply of medication think of your GOP ones. The other one that was interesting is as these frontier models are getting tighter and tighter and tighter and smaller and smaller we'll be able to convert them and put them into ICU put them in machines where we don't need the internet we don't need access and it's gonna be running on the edge. I know that Save AI is doing edge technology. Another one that came that I liked on the list I really think med school I know people will hate for me saying that but I don't think some of us need four years. There might be some people out there that need five years. But with that said AI may need to be leveraged to the point where maybe we only need three years to become a physician

So Jim Pollock, good friend of mine, What are you working on? What is your maximum prediction that you're going to see applied AI in healthcare?

So yeah, Jim Pollock, I'm out in Boulder, Colorado. And so we're working on a startup, it's a spin out from the University of Colorado. And we are developing a small sensor that's non-invasive that can be placed anywhere on their body. And it measures internal body temperatures, so lot of applications and surgical applications anytime there's any kind of hypothermia involved, like aortic arch surgery, for example. Also in ICUs for maintaining brain temperature at normothermia after cardiac arrest, strokes, and TBIs. Military is very interested in early warning of heat stress. They have thousands of casualties a year. Then it also translates right over to athletes and to first responders like firemen.

One prediction for 2026, applied AI in healthcare.

Well, I'm very excited about AI in healthcare in general, we're in really two directions. We can talk about that a little bit later on here as far as implementing as part of a product and then also as a tool. And I think the things, Junaid, that you're actually working on are the ones most exciting to me, where you're looking at very complex imagery and looking for a lot of nuance and to be able to use that AI to be able to scale the ability to analyze very complex imagery out of out of patients and all to really step up the whole pace and overall cut down the cost of health care tremendously, I think.

Love it, Jim. Dipu, your turn.

Thanks, Junaid. Jim, I'm going to echo what you have just said, but just by way of intro, the things that I'm working on are educating the educators and educating that next generation of clinicians to be much, much more savvy with AI so that they're ready in the workforce to apply and implement. My big prediction for 2026 in healthcare is that we're going to have a fundamental shift from asking, can AI help, to where can it help? It will become the infrastructure and embedded into day-to-day healthcare operations. Right now we're using AI as an add-on. I think it's going to become much, much more embedded in the work that we do on a daily basis.

I agree 100%. Thank you. We're going to go ahead next with my favorite and my mentor, my teacher, Arlen Myers.

I think that as long as we are doing things the way we're doing them, that shiny new objects like artificial intelligence will not reduce the cost of care to the patient. My concern is that we're focused on the wrong thing and we're asking the wrong question. And that is, how do we reduce the aggregate and individual cost of care to the patient? I have no evidence that artificial intelligence, to the contrary, is probably raising it, not lowering it. So my concern, bottom line, how does artificial intelligence achieve the sextapole?

I totally agree that again, one of the core objectives of this is to bring it back to the patient and not just the physician or the CEO and the CFO. Next is my good friend, Dr. Shah. By the way, can you talk about your Global Summit Institute as well?

My name is Kianor Shah, the founder of the Global Summit Institute as well as the Doctor to Doctor movement. I believe that in 2026, we are going to see a tremendous amount of improvement in various aspects of AI. I think standards are going to become a big issue. On the patient side, Dr. Myers addressed what we need to see. On the doctor's side, we believe that, you know, for thousands of years was a patient-doctor relationship with tools that we had to treat patients. And I think AI is sort of God's gift at this point to equalize the playing field and we can do a lot of things that these third parties have done with us in the last five decades by utilizing AI properly for the sole benefit of doctors and patients. And the prediction is that the AI integration issue between various platforms will remain a major, major problem and there'll be solutions hopefully for open AI to be able to… readily integrate between different platforms. Lastly, we are in the business of bringing medical doctors and dental doctors together to bridge the gap that's been needed much. And we intend to do that in London at the 2026 Global Medical Dental AI Summit. It's very prudent for the overall health of patients that these two particular subspecialties of healthcare collaborate closely.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Christopher Cunney. I serve as a managing partner for IoTech Consulting. We're a healthcare technology advisory and solutions firm, and I'm focused on right now. One is dealing with a pediatric clinical decision support platform that is integrated with the major EHRs. Most of you may or may not be aware that most EDs and most urgent care facilities do not have a pediatric trained physician generally on staff. And so most of the adult doctors are actually trying to treat children. And in many cases aren't trained appropriately to know the different symptoms and issues and protocols to treat those children. So we've built a platform that is MVP now. We're in various facilities now launching that technology. The other is an electronic health record that we've gotten support from the country of Liberia and we're developing a platform for the continent of Africa.

Here I'm a founder and CEO of AI Connect and VC Arena. have two companies. AI Connect, we're a global consulting firm. We think AI is 95 % business and 5 % technology. That's kind of our principle, right? So what I see people like you, Harvey, Junaid, who's been like really, really, you know, in the industry, you know, really understand the vertical of healthcare you we will shine even more. Right, like I think it's the year for us to prove what AI can deliver for business. No more technology.

So Tim, tell us about you, and then please tell us your prediction.

Hi, I'm Tim Herron. I'm founder of Creative Strategies, one of the high tech consultancies in Silicon Valley.What I am looking at and consulting on is fundamentally the impact of AI on business processes. One of the things that I'm seeing in enterprises across the board is… There's a real big question about integrating artificial intelligence around all processes. But what we are seeing is that AI is becoming more verticalized. That means that they're using it for customer service, for sales, for certain parts of automation. And it's somewhat in its early stages, even with the big companies. But I think that in 2026, that's one of the things that you're going to see, and this includes the medical clinics and the medical operations. I think you're going to see faster integration or a movement of applying artificial intelligence to the business processes.

So I'm Mohammad Jahanzeb. I'm a breast and lung medical oncologist for about 32 years and now pivoted to AI and decision making. So to talk about the future I think radiology, pathology are low-hanging fruit that's obviously where AI is going to be way better than humans it already is and you know human is still in the loop of course and will remain in the loop in many cases.

So I'm Hansa Vargava. I'm a pediatrician by training, but I've been in the digital media industry for a while and I'm actually chief clinical strategy and innovation officer at Helio. And we just built a gen AI tool called Helio AI. So that's been really exciting. I also advise some AI companies as well. And I think the two hopes are what somebody alluded to before, and that is to honestly have more, have doctors at the table more. AI can democratize care. So, Gen. AI tools can have policies and guidelines, which, you know, that doctor, that ER doctor who might have a four-year-old wants fever guidelines for a four month old or a six month old and they can get access to that. And I think the second part is just implementation of these tools. Like I think we need to have the we, not the I. So a lot of collaboration is super important to get these implemented. You can have the best product in the world. It doesn't really matter. You got to get it out there to scale it. But the thing is, that's less of a concern. think the long-term concern maybe. But the short-term concern is, you know, is there gonna be human intelligence degradation? Because we're going to be too dependent on these tools.

Hey guys, this is Tom Meese. for a quick introduction, I work with Jim Pollock at LumenAstra. And I was trained in Stanford Biodesign. one of the things that we see, people are going to chat bots to get basic healthcare information, right? So instead of going to the doctor, a lot of people are going to ChatGPT, entering in wherever it is. So that's something that we see. Like people mentioned, rising cost of healthcare, we're seeing that especially this coming year, there's gonna be a big bump. So I think we're gonna see more people going to those chat bots to get that healthcare information, just looking at where people are going.

I did want to talk a little bit of our predictions and that is the last baby boomers turned 60 last year, the first Gen X was turned 60 this year. We are in the midst of what's called a silver tsunami. By 2030, there'll be more people over 60 than under five. We have a youth crisis and by 2050, two billion people around the world will be over 60. And so you will see the rise of what they call age tech, silver tech, granny tech, and that is technology that are going to be geared towards treating people as they age. think Harvey or someone mentioned things like CareBots, monitoring technologies, AI platforms that will help individuals age in place and help the sandwich generation, those who have young kids and older parents, more effectively manage their parents as they age as well too. And then the last prediction I have is that I think in the next five years, you're going to actually see a digital doctor and that is an AI driven platform that will be able to provide some basic primary care to patients because we are going to have a significant shortage of primary care physicians around the world. And so these technologies are going to be put in place to augment that gap.

I'm Dr. Avinash Yaswal. I, of course, I'm also using AI, but in a manner where I'm part of a company that is partnering with doctors to do their chronic care and also with hospitals. we are, let's say, your solutions provider for Medicare. Medicaid population to kind of close care gaps preventively so that patients don't end up getting hospitalized at the ER where things are much worse.think the baby boomer aging is a huge tsunami coming and longevity medicine is not helping, right? Because in a way where… There's now a clear scientific basis to people, us all being able to add years to our life expectancy by doing things right. And compounded with the fact that kids are not coming into the fold as much as the previous generation. So that's gonna be a very unique situation. Maybe AI will help compound some of that problem but also helps solve some of that problem.The bots are very powerful and is able to churn information like our brains is not wide to do. What we have is for sure empathy, but even in that area we're getting caught upon by the technology. So what we can do is… I think in a manner is always focus on the problems. There's a lot of problems to be solved in society. Very low hanging fruits in this country where a lot of money spent outcomes are terrible. Number 16 life expectancy. think if AI can actually bring that 10 rankings above where it is and it's not getting any better because now, you know, low cost care, longevity medicine, all this is very democratized across the world. So people are living longer.

My prediction is that by the end of 2026,I will say, because I'm 100 % sure of this, what I'm about to say is that bureaucracy within health care systems will continue to impede the potential of AI and will be frustrated this time at the end of the year as well because we're just not set up. The governance is not set up to deal with something as agile and rapidly changing and mind blowing and transformative as AI. We're set up for old school. What, 18, what was it? 15 years bench to bedside. I know it's about half that now. We're just so old school. We cannot process this. Many concerns are valid, of course, but we get so defensive that we will impede progress. So the good news is after 2026, the patients will, the consumers will be so demanding for change that hospitals will either have to adapt quickly or more likely and it's something that Christopher alluded to, you will see the rise, a quick rise of, call it Concierge AI, but you will see people go to new platforms for healthcare that are not a traditional hospital. That's my prediction for 2026.

How's it going guys? Amir Baluch. I'm an advisor for a few healthcare startups in the VC space. We used to have a fund that was open that's actually closed right now, but we do some investing in private equity with healthcare startups and early stage companies. And I'm seeing AI everywhere. People are investing in ideas that don't even make sense. But what some people are alluding to, how are you solving problems and how can you prove that it's actually going to turn into dollars? But this is different because I feel like… intelligence is going to be a commodity. What's going to happen when we have artificial super intelligence that will make better decisions than the president? I think a lot of people are gonna lose some jobs, actually, I'm not trying to be a pessimistic person, butw e're going to eventually have some universal basic income for people that are just not keeping up and not adopting AI. And there are going to be people that own the AI that are making all the money. And we're going to be losing out on the middle class. I see things like that going on very quickly. You know, we're really going to cut out the fluff in health care. And I think there's going to be a few winners. And the money is not going to be spread and the wealth not going to be spread evenly.

I just wanted to add something on the conversation that Deepa had. We've been talking to lot of educators when it comes to the role of AI, and they're actually thinking more in the context of a positive impact on education in two contexts. One is that if you actually have started to use chat GPT for studying for a lesson, you actually learn about the topic better, faster, and potentially deeper. But the other thing that is very important and we're in the enterprise side, are pushing heavy to the educators is you're not going to have a job unless you understand how to use AI. That you're going to have to be a schooled in the concept of artificial intelligence and large language models and eventually agentic AI even to be in the workforce. AI has to be really thought of as an educational tool and as a priority in education for the purpose of learning the skills of AI to apply it to business. Without that, Yeah, you're gonna lose a job.

So really teaching these students how to use these tools better, learn prompt engineering to get deeper so that they are able to make connections across multiple courses and cross pollinate their knowledge is really going to be important. And, you know, I spent a lot of time with this student who had all the tools, they pay for the apps and all the tools, but the question is, are they absorbing it enough for an assessment that they're going to have to pass? On the flip side, faculty need to change and adapt to these tools now being available to students.

Anyway, I have a question for all of you Can you give me a little insight? What do you see some of the jobs that definitely going to be gone? For example, radiologists, and then what is your advice for them?

As far as any profession that has what we call human touch point, defining human touch point in the sense like nurse, physical therapy, occupational therapy, etc. until the robotics, which is going to be like at least 10 to 15 years away, we are actually going to see increased demand because a lot of people are left. mean, there physicians who did not invest in my company because they said that saved life AI is going to, you know, basically replace acute stroke physicians. And now they're coming back and now they realize that we can see 10 times more stroke patients. So there is an iceberg below that no people understand that we are really not following standards of care, proper follow up, all of that. And these new, from horizontal to vertical solutions is going to be where physicians are going to be deeply engaged in a more meaningful way. And we still are going to need more and more touch point based providers.

I see what Junaid saying, for me personally it's the great shift. How can I shift my current job? When I learn to be a doctor, do I still practice how I was when I medical student? The other thing is, do we see jobs being launched? Yes, and will we see more jobs being created that being lost? Maybe not more than likely. There's this awkward phase and maybe that's where that What Amir was saying that we'll have to have a certain amount of income for certain people because if not, we can start seeing crime and if that happens then what will happen to our society? Just I don't want to sound like doomsday but I do see a tax coming and that tax will be higher corporations that are leveraging AI to a certain point and it'll be inversely proportional to the amount of people that they fire. So that they could have some money to go back into the force because for society reason the next thing I want to highlight is Martex law This information is exponential the technology our organizations everybody listening is logarithmic and as a result There's a gap and the bigger the gap the bigger the disruption and so if you don't want to be disrupted then you want to be closer to that exponential straight line that's going up because then you're more likely to disrupt others

I just wanted to add that it's kind of like the wild, wild west right there, right now. You know, they did say the same things about cell phones and internet, but it's not that AI is gonna replace our jobs. AI is gonna replace the jobs of those people that don't learn how to use AI to apply it within their businesses. Anytime you have new innovations, new markets are created, new jobs are created, new positions are created. And I think the most important thing is for doctors to create standards and a framework around artificial intelligence before it gets out of hand, before AI starts talking to itself. So Deepu and Tim, you you read the Forbes and the Times, healthcare is the most resistance to AI out of all the industries. So when people still are going to like the human touch, the human empathy, and if doctors, a fraction of the 30 million running around actually came together and created a framework around this, I think we'll be immune to the concerns that have been discussed. That's all. Thank you.

The patient is in the center and they're getting social media advice from influencers and some of these influencers are not doctors They're not PAs. They're not healthcare professionals. They're influencers and some of them are pushing a product. So our patient is hearing certain things saying, my gosh, I need to try this product. And how do they decide? They're getting overwhelmed. The next portion is there's this AI chat bots. And as we know, they hallucinate. so however they're being used, that patient again is getting information that they're like, is this right? Is this wrong? But you know what? It's on the internet. It's got to be right, right? And then we have political forces different parts. Do you live in California? Do live in New York? Do you live in the European Union? And then depending where you live will influence your way of using AI and taking that information in. And there'll be some guardrails depending on that country. It changes. So what is that common thread? How do we trust this information? And this is where our health care system comes, to come in and tell the patient, hey, that influencer is wrong in x, y, z. This information that you got from the bot is wrong, and here's why. And then us be the orchestrator, meaning as a health care professional, going through and saying, OK, let me re-engineer this chat bot. Let me make sure it's not hallucinating. Let me make sure I'm doing this correctly. And so I really like this picture, because at the end of the day, it goes back to the health care profession to be the empathy, to be that perspective person to help with the complex decision to be that human in the loop.