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At this year’s CES, expos and digital health programming officially kicked off on January 8 with a panel called “The Future of Health: Views from the Top.” The conversation between executives from pharma, tech, hospitals, and health plans focused on how tech is currently used in healthcare as well as the challenges and possibilities of the future.
The conversation spanned topics like artificial intelligence (AI), home health, and clinical trials. At the end of the chat, moderator Logan Plaster, chief content officer at StartUp Health, asked the panelists what advancement they hope to be celebrating in 10 years.
Here’s how they responded.
These answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Diogo Rau, EVP and chief information and digital officer, Eli Lilly and Company
I would like to see some breakthrough medicines out there. I think we need to focus a lot more on prevention, rather than treatments. If I walk into an emergency room right now, I’m going to pay about 3% out of pocket. If I go to a biomedicine [firm], I’m going to pay 20% out of pocket. These perverted economics drive people to avoid preventing treatment, and going and getting it when they need it later. We need to stop that. And I would like to see medicines: more medicines that are cheaper, more available for everyone, so people don’t have to go to the hospital unless they really, really need to.
Michael Howell, chief clinical officer, Google
We’ll see medicines that have been discovered that cure things that we think are incurable today, or require mechanical support today. I am hopeful that we’ll see the democratization of expertise in a way that makes that number of 4.5 billion people [worldwide] who don’t have access to essential health services much smaller. But I think technology is the only way to do that.
Janice Nevin, president and CEO, ChristianaCare
Ten years from now, I hope to close hospital beds. The hospital will be purely for intensive care, high-tech procedures, a place where women will deliver babies, and I’ll be able to do that because so much of the care will have moved into the community, the home, into ambulatory settings, and primary care can be done with AI. And so 10 years from now, we will have healthier communities, healthier people managing chronic disease so much more effectively that I can shrink those acute care services.
David Holmberg, president and CEO, Highmark Health
I think we will have made a big impact on chronic disease. I truly believe that between the innovation that’s available to us, but more importantly, using artificial intelligence and computing power that is in front of us over the next decade. I think we will knock down some serious issues. And I think we’ve got to get away from sick care and start focusing on being upstream, and really helping people stay healthy and give them the information that will allow them to do that.