Q&A: The changing landscape of AI and innovation in healthcare

AI is reshaping healthcare, making it more personalized and proactive, says Daniel Kraft, physician-scientist and founder of NextMed Health and Digital.Health. 

Kraft sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss the healthcare technology conference NextMed Health and how he sees AI-powered tools improving accessibility and affordability. Still, he warns that regulation and outdated systems remain hurdles.

MobiHealthNews: Trump announced Project Stargate in January, and then DeepSeek-R1 came out. How do you see AI changing in healthcare?

Daniel Kraft: Stargate is emblematic of how much resources and focus are going on to help the United States really keep its perceived leg up in the space. There are a lot of use cases applied to healthcare, from personalized cancer vaccines to enabling more precise, personalized, proactive healthcare, not just sick care. 

But what we saw through DeepSeek is that these technologies are moving very quickly and are becoming democratized, where they can be built faster, cheaper and, in some cases, have better functionality. I think what is exciting about that is these are becoming platforms that will enable many, many use cases, of which today’s examples are already very exciting. I would just remind folks that it’s still very, very early days. As an innovator, I think these provide very exciting new platforms to change the game across the whole healthcare continuum.

MHN: Can AI become a democratized tool to provide personalized health agents and improve preventative care?

Kraft: Healthcare has a focus on data, which is often very intermittent, you know, collected in the four walls of a clinic or hospital, and then relates to a reactive, sick care mindset. What’s exciting about AI and its ability to be multi-modal is we can now collect different forms of data from now low-cost genomics, proteomics, metabolomics to digitomes from our wearables and beyond, put those in context and start to create truly personalized digital twins and give agentic interfaces. 

I call it generative health, where the interfaces, the agents will match the users’ [the patients’] age, culture, language, personality type, education and health goals and will really start to make the data turn into actionable insights and information that can be leveraged at the bedside, at the home or in the gym.  

And so big picture, we can now go from this often one-size-fits-all guidance to something that’s truly, almost in real-time, could be crowd-sourced information if we design the systems in smart ways, and then can really empower individuals and clinicians of all sorts to truly guide much more proactive, personalized prevention, healthspan, diagnostics and therapy.

MHN: How does NextMed Health touch on these topics?

Kraft: Well, I think many of us have been to various siloed meetings and conferences. I’m trained as an oncologist. I’ll go to ASCO [American Society of Clinical Oncology], cardiologists go to ACC, and beyond. It’s very rare that you bring people together in cross-disciplinary form to sort of break open and converge their silos. 

Now, the future of medicine is being built on this super convergence, of course, of AI, big data, robotics, synthetic biology, the internet of medical things, and digital-enabled tools and solutions. 

So, what we do at NextMed Health is get people up to speed with what’s now, which is already pretty exciting, what is coming near within the next one to two years, and what is coming next, to give them a bit of that 5- to 10-year view to help them play a role, not just in future-proofing their clinical practice or pharma company or healthcare system, but to play a role in really catalyzing and enabling that future because the future is cross-disciplinary.

MHN: What is most exciting to you about the future of medtech?

Kraft: It’s the ability to really bring healthcare anywhere. The ability to have basically an AI-enabled clinician and health coach on your smartphone that is informed by your low-cost wearable device and by improving data insights. And that means we can do diagnostics in new ways. We can upskill a community health worker. We can engage everyone. You know, the engaged consumer is the new drug. 

We’re seeing more and more self-care, whether it’s getting your own labs and helping those be interpreted with a GPT agent or the data from your digital exhaust presented to you in a way that’s going to help nudge you in the right direction. We have this kind of exciting ability to both collect data at lower price points, merge them together and make them more accessible almost anywhere. And I think that has the opportunity to actually improve outcomes and lower costs and enable us to be much more proactive and preventative rather than reactive.  

There is a famous quote that the future is coming faster than we think, and a lot of these technologies, some of them, are here today. For example, I have a platform called Digital.Health with several thousand healthcare solutions. The challenge is, even if you have the next generation AI or digital therapeutic or new drug, the challenge often is not the technology but integrating that into the culture and the workflows of clinicians, aligning incentive models and even rethinking, as we need to do today, the future of the workforce and medical education.  

First-year medical students in med school today won’t be finished for seven years – that’s four years of medical school and at least three years of residency. How are they going to be prepared to leverage these new tools, and how will we blend and merge the best of what AI can do with the human side of the equation?  

Technology by itself is great, but it has to plug in. It has to be regulated, and often, the technology is moving much faster than regulatory reimbursement, culture and society are even ready for. It’s hard to even know how to regulate something that’s moving so quickly. What guardrails do you put on it? And some people are unregulated. You know, what happens in China may be less regulated or has less guardrails than something developed by OpenAI, by Claude or by Google.  

I think what is exciting … is how you inspire and get folks to see the art of the possible. There’s never been a more exciting time to rethink and reimagine healthcare across the care continuum, including reimagining public health, how we regulate, how we engage and how we do care at home. There’s an old quote by John Maynard Keynes saying the challenge isn’t the new ideas; it’s escaping from the old ones. That’s often a challenge today as well.