What’s Next in Health? Highlights from NextMed 2025... Dr. Daniel Kraft, Tech Nation Health Chief Correspondent
Every year, Tech Nation Health chief correspondent doctor Daniel Kraft hosts the NextMed Health conference, and every year, we ask him what he learned. Well, Daniel, it's so great to see you. This has been a busy spring. I mean, and of course, we're just done with NextMed Health 2025 in San Diego. Let's talk about some high notes there in San Diego.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:Yeah. So NextMed Health is a program I've been curating for more than thirteen years actually. This is our program we started in San Diego in the Hotel del Coronado in 2013 where each year we bring together an amazing community to look at the future of health and medicine at this sort of super convergence of technologies, not just AI or medical devices or pharma or nanotech or biotech but bringing people together to kind of get a taste of what's now, what's near to happening, and what's coming next, and what's needed to really catalyze the future of health and medicine. And this year we had over 70 faculty and 25 sessions, so we really covered a lot about what's on the cutting edge and helped people sort of catalyze the future of health and medicine.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Well, I'm gonna ask you about one person that I thought was absolutely brilliant. And, of course, name is Larry Brilliant. Let's talk about that. He was in several sessions, but let's focus on his message.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:Well, Doctor. Brilliant, who's, if you're not aware, is a famed epidemiologist. He played a key role in helping eradicate smallpox in the 1970s with the WHO. He later ran google.org. He helped co found Seva, which has helped with blindness for millions of folks around the planet.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:We sort of asked Larry, as such a bit of a sage, to kind of give us perspectives on how do we meet this current moment. It's no secret that right now in the few months of 2025, health and medicine and public health are a bit under threat from challenges to NIH budget, to USAID, to WHO. And Larry sort of gave us a bit of the perspective. Seem like we're in difficult times, we've had worse times, the Cuban Missile Crisis, World War II, and how do you sort of do well and do good in times that are challenging? And he sort of challenged us all to do, you know, something that helps somebody who's less capable or or lucky as we are as we try and make changes going forward.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:But also the perspective of taking the long view and how do we kind of learn to cross collaborate in challenging times because often it's the challenging windows that catalyze the future in unexpected and hopefully positive ways. And so, you know, the next med health context, wanted to have the perspective of history, but also how do you shape the future in in really empowering ways with the with our sort of core aim of how do we democratize health and medicine around the planet and make health more health more accessible and more equitable, whether it's rural California or rural Rwanda? And and Larry Brilliant, gave a great sort of lessons in in how to think about that future and how to even have perspective on our challenging times.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Well, I have to say that I was especially moved when he talked about what it was like before vaccines. We kind of forgot about that. And we were also our expectations were modified given that, Oh, we had a COVID vaccine in a year. So it's pretty easy. It's not easy.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:It's not easy. And also we sometimes have short memories. Doctor. Brilliant made the point that in the last century, fifty million people died of smallpox. Now it's eradicated.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:You know, fifty years ago people were in iron lungs from polio. Now we have very few cases of polio, but with the changes in perception and some of the anti science and anti vaxx movement in the last few months we're seeing the deaths of measles here in The United States, something hugely preventable. And so we need to understand that our massive impacts on health span and lifespan are largely thanks to public health and we need to be not withdrawing from that but enhancing our systems to both you know prevent diseases using vaccines and other measures but also to think proactively about how do we design and optimize health span for all of us.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Well I have to say you had to do AI.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:AI or I'd to call it more IA, as you've heard me say before, more intelligence augmentation. But of course a through line from NextMed Health this year was all the ways that AI, which is moving so quickly where you can sort of load up your protein and potentially find understand how it folds and how you might identify particular drugs and molecules that might act as drug against those sort of targets. So we're really starting to speed up the ability to, not in the old ways of screening thousands of molecules, but design the molecules using AI machine learning that might fit a particular protein or mechanism to start to cure diseases, in much faster and personalized and precise ways. So that's a bit of a through line, but what I thought was most interesting is now the ways that AI is enabling us to take all these new omics sets, right? It's not just the genome, it's now the metabolome from a continuous glucose monitor.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:It might be the low cost proteome, it could be your sociome data, your digitome data from your smartwatches and wearables, and how we're able to start to put those together and be empowered. And one of my favorite talks was by he's a technologist turned patient named Steven Brown, and Steve, had been in the med tech space twenty years ago, and got back into it recently because, unfortunately he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. He shared the story of being diagnosed with myeloma and how long it took for him to get diagnosed even though the doctors had his labs. He built his own sort of health agent, he's a super programmer and AI expert. He built sort of an Hippocrates and also his own virtual hematologist and cardiologist who looked at his data from before he was diagnosed and said, of course you should get a bone marrow and this looks concerning for a malignancy in the marrow.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:And just as an example of entering this age where you're gonna be interact with different agents of different specialties, it could be the overall master clinician like Hippocrates, it could be a nutritionist, could be a workout coach that's gonna interact with you as a very smart agent, can leverage all these new LLMs, large language models from multiple sources, and really give you a new level of interaction. We're not waiting months to see the specialists, and will enable all of us to be much more proactive and engaged in our health. And where I think that's gonna head in the next couple years is we'll all have our own sort of self agents tuned to our age, our culture, our personality. I like to call them sort of generative health. And these will be super tuned and they'll hopefully be proactive and preventative and keep you on track to a long lifespan and health span, but also when you do have a disease we'll be able to sift through the data and pick it up early proactively and then guide you and your clinical teams to make the smartest, most personalized health recommendations whether it's for something really challenging like myeloma or something as common as a sprained ankle.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:So really interesting ways that we can start to bring massive data to insights to something you can use in action on yourself.
Dr. Moira Gunn:And what I like about this is the idea of plug and play. Like, well, I'm really concerned about my voice and whether for me, there's a lot of recordings in my voice. You could tell the difference between it now and it thirty years ago if you wanted. But the idea that you could decide that in your in your everyday life about what you want checked with the intelligence that's now behind it.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:Right. And that can almost be seamless. The things you've just mentioned, your voice is being recorded all the time whether you want to on your smartphone or on a podcast. And we actually had a great session led by the team at Click Labs where they just recently published that the sound of your voice, the voice is a biomarker, they've been able to leverage to predict who has diabetes, who has early pre diabetes because of high blood sugar or might even have diabetes and not know they have it, just based on the AI analysis of your voice. They're also doing similar work where their voice can predict if you have high blood pressure.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:And also other folks have shown that voice biomarkers can predict early signs of neurologic disorders like ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, or early forms of Parkinson's. So that's something that we're collecting ubiquitously and can be used for proactive early detection. Another example you talked about gait. Well, our smartwatches, smart rings, our our Fitbits to beyond actually able to look at your gait and see subtle changes. In fact, on some platforms it can tell you if you're likely to have weakness in one leg or likely to have a fall.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:And so there's even this idea of mobility as a new vital sign, which really correlates to health span, risk of a fall, breaking a hip for example. And so those are small examples of small data collected in interesting ways when you put them together in context, will start to give us our sort of health agents that will give us proactive warning and early intervention.
Dr. Moira Gunn:It seems to me that you have a video of some of the people who were speaking online, isn't that right?
Dr. Daniel Kraft:Yes. If you go to nextmed.health and you look under videos, you can see our catalog of a lot of the talks from our prior NextBends. We're starting to put up put up some of the new talks every week from this year's. It's a great place to get up to speed on all the things that are happening that are impacting health care. Again, not just the high-tech, but we leverage in design thinking and creativity, the sort of social determinants of health, health access and equity.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:We had Doctor. Yomi, who's a physician from Nigeria, who brought the sort of lesson of you don't wanna just drop off a technology in Africa and say good luck. You wanna teach the folks there how to innovate and leverage and come up with their own solutions, often leveraging technologies. And in many cases, these technologies are leapfrogging what can happen in The United States and let's say Europe, they can go to Africa, can go to India and be implemented. A small example is a company called Jivi dot ai which is an AI doctor in your pocket launched in India, available here now where you can talk to it in Hindi or Farsi or French and you'll have an AI clinician sense that can help triage you.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:It also can be a health coach for your nutrition, it also uses the camera to track your vital signs. These are things that are often going to places where there almost is no doctor available, and it's gonna start to help democratize care around the planet.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Nextmed. Health. And hopefully, you'll stay healthy. I'll see you next week.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:See you. Stay healthy.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Tech Nation Health chief correspondent doctor Daniel Kraft is the founder and chair of NextMed Health on the web at nextmed.health and digital.health. More information about Daniel at danielcraft m d dot net.
