Panel
In Service of a Healthier Tomorrow | Global Conference 2025
Milken InstituteEsther Krofah, Gregory Case, Judy Faulkner, Robert Ford, Pablo Legorreta, Ellen Sigal, Greg Case
- By 2035, robotic surgery is projected to become mainstream, while the healthcare ecosystem faces a workforce shortage insufficient for a growing population living longer with chronic diseases, necessitating automation and automated response technology (ART) for patient communication and clinical note-taking.
- AI is expected to evolve from an augmentation tool to a necessity by 2035, progressing through three stages from assistant to colleague to potential takeover of specific functions, including determining diagnoses, treatments, and durations.
- Regulatory frameworks must advance by 2035 to permit automation in diagnosis and treatment, though hesitation may exist regarding AI systems not classified as medical devices.
- Healthcare delivery is predicted to shift reward structures toward broader service penetration rather than product pricing, with payer and provider integration improving significantly within the next few years to reduce prior authorizations and denials.
- Population health outcomes and cost curves must improve by 2035, as current healthcare costs consume 21% of US GDP without a sustainable trajectory, requiring data and analytics to scale innovations like GLP-1 drugs.
- Government funding reductions are projected to cut NIH funding by 40% (from $47 billion to $27 billion) and FDA staff by 3,500, creating risks of brain drain among non-US citizen scientists and causing drug approval timelines to lag behind Europe.
- Xenotransplantation using genetically modified pig kidneys is expected to enter Phase 1 clinical trials involving 20 humans on dialysis within approximately one month, with potential costs in the low thousands of dollars to address organ shortages.
- US leadership in innovation is at risk over the next 12 months without common sense in policy, as the US currently funds two-thirds of the $300 billion annual global life sciences R&D.
- New mechanisms including implantable biowearables, brain-computer interfaces, and real-time clinical trial data are expected to provide deeper insights, understand the human brain, and accelerate research outcomes.
- The personal health score concept is expected to dictate individual contributions to the health system, while interoperability initiatives will focus on following patient care rather than selling data to third parties.
- Risk cover mechanisms are expected to be developed to reduce investment volatility for expensive gene and cell therapies, and public-private partnerships are anticipated as the model for responding to future system shocks.
- Global supply chains face potential disruption from tariffs, though many healthcare companies project the ability to absorb these financial impacts up to a certain limit.