Panel, Conference Presentation
Innovation Beyond Borders: New Approaches Transforming Health | Global Conference 2025
Milken InstituteAlice Park, Mansoor Ibrahim Al Mansoori, Olivier Bogillot, Geetha Tharmaratnam, Prashant Warier
- The healthcare system is expected to shift from reactive lifespan management to a proactive, 360-degree approach focused on preventing disease and extending healthy lifespans, driven by technological innovation and systemic thinking.
- Future care models will integrate social determinants such as nutrition, sleep, and environment, treating healthy living as a universal birthright supported by funding that outpaces current gaps and catalytic capital deployed over longer time horizons.
- Pharmaceutical development will increasingly target preventive treatments and vaccines, with specific predictions that Type 1 diabetes onset can be delayed by multiple years and that new interventions will address RSV and COPD.
- Technology and AI are projected to act as essential infrastructure that unifies disparate datasets like wearables and EMRs to enable real-time decision-making, deciphering years of body data to predict future health events.
- AI applications are expected to include automating chest x-ray analysis to increase productivity by 80%, triaging patients for CT scans via ambient AI to expand lung cancer screening, and transcribing doctor-patient conversations for real-time diagnostic support.
- The Abu Dhabi integrated system serves as a leading model combining clinical, genomic, lifestyle, and environmental data to predict, prevent, and personalize interventions, with plans to identify risk groups for obesity, diabetes, and cholesterol.
- Implementation of the Abu Dhabi model is anticipated to allow for proactive intervention mechanisms and the detection of stage-zero colon cancer via liquid biopsy, though long-term financial impacts may follow a curve where benefits are realized later rather than immediately.
- New reimbursement and incentivization mechanisms are required to support prevention, as current global models primarily incentivize treatment, necessitating a move away from siloed systems to integrated ones that can communicate.
- Regulators, including the FDA, are expected to remain open to fast-moving innovation provided robust science and clinical trial designs are used, though Type 1 diabetes trials will require long-term follow-up and extended investment periods.
- Business models relying on traditional mechanisms risk being overtaken by new, differently regulated models leveraging AI, while countries like the UAE and Japan are predicted to become centers of excellence attracting early-stage businesses.
- AI is forecast to become a utility similar to electricity, driving smarter, more efficient, and predictive care, potentially bypassing mid-care exams for high-risk individuals and eventually providing health equity as energy costs decrease.
- Human doctors are not expected to be replaced in the next five to 10 years, but AI will function as an augmentation tool, with immediate realities remaining as human-plus-AI collaboration despite potential emerging superintelligence.
- Genomic sequencing is expected to become standard in electronic health records to identify mutations and disease risks, with mandatory pre-marital screening in Abu Dhabi aimed at creating healthier generations and informed reproductive decisions.
- Precision health initiatives will require data on gender, geography, and race to ensure inclusivity and remove bias, relying on training AI on larger, more diverse datasets to improve efficacy.
- Legal frameworks are expected to protect data sovereignty and privacy, allowing data sharing only in de-anonymized forms, while a period of catch-up may occur where physicians outperform AI due to insufficient training data.
- Partnerships among regulators, patient groups, and physicians will continue to define endpoints for preventive trials, and behavioral integration with healthcare professionals is critical to prevent a fallback to traditional solutions.
- Governments implementing universal health coverage are predicted to shift from "healthcare systems" to "healthcare ecosystems" that embed prevention, addressing rising disease burdens and reducing per capita resources.
- A cross-sectorial "Healthy Living Unit" is anticipated to influence policies in schools and municipalities to increase exercise and design walkable communities, while ambient AI flags risk factors during patient visits to prevent missed diagnoses.
- AI reading x-rays autonomously is already operational in 60 to 70 countries for tuberculosis screening where radiologists are unavailable, and the speed of AI innovation is expected to outpace regulation, requiring policy adjustments.
- The private and public sectors share a commitment to duty of care beyond the bottom line, and while data sovereignty laws will protect privacy, more individuals are expected to share information if choices and benefits are clear.