NextMed Health 2025: Agentic AI in healthcare and beyond

[00:00:00] Dear listeners, welcome to Faces of Digital Health, a podcast about digital health and how healthcare systems around the world adopt technology with me, Tjasa Zajc. Today's short episode will address some of the trends shaping the future of healthcare, agentic AI, longevity efforts, and uncertain policy in light of the current US government.

[00:00:28] I called Daniel Crest, founder of NextMed Health, a unique interdisciplinary community dedicated to catalyzing and accelerating the arrival of a new human-centric technology-enabled health age. NextMed Health is coming up the end of March 2025 in San Diego, and I called Daniel to tell me which critical topics to eventually address.

[00:00:52] NextMed Health is a very special event, focused on updates in biotech, policy, conversions of technology, and expectations of the future. I specifically asked Daniel to comment the expectations that the current US government will not regulate AI, and how this will impact healthcare. I picked his brain on longevity and health span, and innovations in the brain-body-mind connections, and more.

[00:01:18] I will be covering NextMed, so expect updates on my LinkedIn profile, Faces of Digital Health YouTube channel, and a recap in the Faces of Digital Health newsletter. Find the links to all these channels in show notes, and make sure to go to nextmed.health to check out the conference and join us in San Diego. Now let's dive in.

[00:01:52] Daniel, hi, and thank you so much for joining me for a very brief discussion. I just visited HIMSS Global, and one thing that was really interesting for me in light of all the recent changes that have happened is that some speakers mentioned that this government is not going to regulate AI, so this is bringing with it tons of developments and expectations. On the one hand, I guess some people expect that innovation is going to skyrocket.

[00:02:22] Others are a bit worried. What do you think about that? The unregulating AI. I guess there's comparable elements to deregulating things like our food and our vaccines and our medicines, right? You need some regulation to show things are safe, number one, and effective. And of course, AI is not the equivalent of a pharma drug, but we have the challenge of trustable AI. If you have an AI in a black box that's managing sepsis or recommending a drug or reading a next ray,

[00:02:50] you want some element that's safe and effective, essentially. So there's a challenge of completely deregulating. Of course, you can overregulate things, but we don't want to end up with unpasteurized milk and ivermectin as our approved therapy for the next pandemic. There's some challenges with the new folks involved, and in some fields, you can run fast and break things. I think that's the thing. But when health and medicine, particularly with AI as well, I think we need to be a little bit careful, have some guardrails in place.

[00:03:16] Yeah, luckily for the U.S., there's several initiatives and organizations such as CHI, such as DIME, that are implementing frameworks and assurance stamps that can help clinicians or institutions see what has already been tested or has gotten some sort of an approval. And, yeah, the reason I basically started this discussion with this question is because in the unpredictable future,

[00:03:44] I'm really wondering what you have planned for NextMed, a conference starting end of March, early April, that always tries to present what's next in healthcare. Can you give me a brief overview of what you have planned this year? Sure. Well, NextMed Health, which I've been running since 2013 in San Diego at the Hotel Del Coronado, it's evolved for something called exponential medicine, is generally a place to look at the super convergence of technologies,

[00:04:13] AI, robotics, 3D printing, nanotech, chatbots, drones, psychedelics, and beyond, and go, how are we putting them together to reimagine the future? But this future has changed in the last six weeks, right? We're in a new world. The question I think we're going to be asking at NextMed a bit this year is, how do we meet this moment? NextMed Health, which is coming up March 30th, April 2nd, in San Diego at the Magical Hotel Del, has been really a community and a platform to reimagine health and medicine writ large.

[00:04:39] And we all go to often siloed conferences, you're at HIMSS, a little more health IT and digital health focused. I might go to oncology ones, I'm an oncologist. There's pharma meetings, there's all sorts of siloed elements, AI, et cetera. But what's magical about NextMed Health, and you've been there, is that we bring together a tribe of clever optimists to look at this future collaboratively. From different angles. And so we take our famous grubs picture on the beach. We have an integrated stage, unlike something like HIMSS, where you can be at 15 sessions at once.

[00:05:07] We try and focus our attention with the amazing participants and faculty in the main ballroom. Get a flavor for what's happening in AI, of course, and synthetic biology, to CRISPR, to digital health, to mental health, to surgical, et cetera. From these different angles and with a frame of kind of what's now, near, and next. We also have this amazing innovation lab with about 60 startups, selected down for about 300, where you get to touch the future a bit early. There's still a bit of saving little room so you can apply for the innovation lab.

[00:05:35] And we have these many startup awards. And then we also mix in music and yoga and magic and artists and bring in the human spirit element of the whole equation. So it's a kind of a community for a place where folks collaborate, the sparks fly, and you get a taste of the future a bit earlier, which should inform what we do next. And of course, what we do next in this new age, particularly with the changes with everything from the NIH to the CDC to USAID, we need to meet this moment and look rationally, not politically, about what do we need going forward.

[00:06:04] We have the amazing faculty, I think, Larry Brilliant, who used to be at WHO and Skull Foundation, has a big perspective on epidemiology and public health. We'll have folks like Jennifer Gartner from Buck on women's health. Folks like I'm here, Dan Rubin, who ran Stanford Hospital. And then one medical, folks like Chris Longhurst who are looking a lot at what's effective and safe and reliable AI. A whole spectrum of amazing faculty. And I encourage folks to come. You can go to nextmed.health to get a taste of that.

[00:06:34] So enough of the quick blurb, but that's a bit of what we're doing. And I know you're going to be there. I would love to have you and others in the mix. And I was at NextMed also in 2023. And I think one of the things that really stood out for me was that it was so great to just have one stage. And very clearly, everyone that came here came to the conference to really get updated on the latest trends and what's coming next.

[00:07:02] And yeah, not to have meetings during the presentation. So that's really good. It's amazing. I would say it's amazing networking. People do a mix in the mix. We have a bonfire in the beach. We have a silent disco. Kind of fun things in the mix. You really get to taste the future. We had Moderna there in 2015 before anyone knew what mRNA was. We had Omada back there in 2013, I think our first year there, thinking of the future of what they were doing with pre-diabetes. We've had the early versions of VR headsets and next-generation wearables.

[00:07:30] And there's going to be some exciting things, I think, unveiled this year as well. But it is really a place to get out of your old silo, meet other folks from different realms. When you learn from someone doing work out of Israel with a Khaleed, like Ron Balasar, who's a friend and a colleague, what they've done there that could apply to the U.S., or innovations that are coming out of Africa, or how we're going to leapfrog and take some of these digital tools and others and bring them to places that you can't do effective innovation in the U.S., for example, or Europe. That's for the SparSky. Yes. You shared a dress schedule with me.

[00:07:59] So one thing that I want to really ask you about is agentic AI, something that we see as the next step in the development of AI. How do you see that it can be applied to healthcare? What do you expect that the speakers are going to be talking about in that realm? I think when you think about agentic AI, I think of it as a new multimodal health. I call it not generative AI, but generative health, where our agents will have potentially all of our data that we want to share with them,

[00:08:27] our digitome, our microbiome, if we do that, our metabolome, our base elements, our sociome. They'll be able to talk to us based on our age, cultural language, personality type. There's already some amazing chatbats out there getting more and more expressive and more conversational. And when they can become an agent, so much of health and medicine is communication, having a trusted clinician, nurse, pharmacist. When you can have an agent that matches you and your needs and your personality type,

[00:08:53] that can help you walk through prevention and wellness plans and health span. And also, if you get a new diagnosis, instead of going right to Dr. Google or Dr. GPT directly, it can help parse you through that information, integrate your labs, collaborate with your clinician, not replace them. So I think these agents are defined in many ways, but they're going to become a key piece and they can be democratized. Anyone with a smartphone can basically have their own sort of personal health agent soon. That can really connect the dots and found source knowledge and insights from many other folks just like you.

[00:09:23] One topic that I've been thinking about lately is the mind-body connection that you are also addressing at NextMed. And if you look at the books from Gabor Mate and everything that he writes about, the impact of social determinants of health, the impact of stress, the impact of suppressed anger. He doesn't care about molecules. He doesn't care about biomarkers.

[00:09:48] He's really looking at the causes of diseases from a perspective that we don't really understand yet quite well. In that perspective, what do you have in plan this year? In 2023, a big topic was food as medicine. Yeah, what's on this year? I think we are always integrating into the programming and our thought that, yes, healthcare isn't just a bucket of technologies or siloed molecules or organ systems.

[00:10:16] We're in this sort of, again, this multimodal, multi-omic age. And part of that is our brain-mind-health-social connection. We've always integrated into programming music and mindfulness and meditation. This year, we'll have a whole session on music as medicine. We're all tuned to music. And we'll be measuring with a special technology. Everybody's, we'll have James Malt from Biointelligence. We're going to monitor everyone's vitals who wants to be monitored through a music as medicine session or through the whole event. So we'll experiment like we did a couple of years ago with Allo Black.

[00:10:46] We looked at everyone's vital signs using Bina.ai to see the effect of music on the room's overall physiology. So I think that's going to be a continuing topic. And there's now even the thing of medicinal media we've had in the past. We'll have other elements of video games for mental health. Adam Gazzelli will be there from UCSF who developed Neuroscape. And the video game Achille, which is a kind of mind-body connection which should treat things like ADHD. So in this digital therapeutic realm, the mind-body connection.

[00:11:14] And now that we can do that through avatars and do your workouts. We'll also have, by the way, the lead coach from Supernatural, Leanne. If you've done virtual reality workouts, she's going to talk about the ability using virtual reality to build new senses of self and community which also tie to that mind-body connection. Whether it's a psychic workout or being connected with others while you engage in healthy activities. Mental health really is one of the key cornerstones of health.

[00:11:41] Also often mentioned when we talk about longevity. I spoke to Jack Kreindler a month ago. I think he's also going to be there. He's the physician from the UK trying to redefine basically how you should deliver healthcare. And what was a brilliant thought that he gave me was that longevity is nothing but a brilliant rebranding of prevention. And I thought that was just something that I'm using in my slides now.

[00:12:10] Tell me, what did you prepare on that end? So longevity, aging well, age tech. Yes, I don't prefer the term longevity. I prefer the term health span. We want to increase our health span and narrow our sick span. And we'll have an amazing session focused on that. Ken Dykewald from Age Wave is going to help set the perspective. We'll have Jennifer Garrison on ovarian health and women's aging. Maddie Dykewald is doing work on women living longer lives. XPRIZE, which is now doing a health span XPRIZE specifically.

[00:12:38] And Jack Kreindler, who's doing a platform on helping founders and others optimize their health as entrepreneurs. But yeah, really focusing really on this rebranded prevention, better screening, optimizing sleep, exercise, social connection. There's no yet magic pill. A lot of folks from Brian Johnson and others are trying to look at what is this magical thing? There's not going to be any one thing. I think we need to be mindful that it's a smart rebranding. There's a lot of things in the zeitgeist. There's also a lot of snake oil out there right now, especially being pilfered by some very well-known folks.

[00:13:08] I don't think you go to a podcast to get your health and medical information, at least in most settings. So it's an interesting time. Start to optimize your health span through the smart basic things. But at the same time, the science is getting interesting on understanding aging clocks and potentially the next decade ahead, particularly with AI meets drug discovery, ways to stop and even reverse aging in really effective ways. So watch that space, but be aware of the hype. Yeah. Just to recap, remind me again on the concrete date.

[00:13:37] Full schedule is coming at the end of this week. We've had some moving parts, but next med health, next med.health has all the information. It starts March 30th at 1 p.m. Goes to April 2nd at noon at San Diego at the very iconic and magical Hotel Del Coronado. Everyone's invited. It's not for any one type of clinician or investor or startup, or it's this magical meld that you've experienced. And I encourage you to join. We'll have an online option as well. And if you want to watch some of the talks from prior years,

[00:14:04] you can go to nextmed.health slash videos and get a taste of what's coming next because it's an exciting time to remand the future. Also a challenging time that we need to address in science and healthcare at large. And I think it's a community effort to connect those dots to make sure we're moving forward for better health for all. Daniel, thank you so much for the brief updates. And I will see you soon in San Diego. You've been listening to Faces of Digital Health, a proud member of the Health Podcast Network.

[00:14:34] If you enjoyed the show, do leave a rating or a review wherever you get your podcast, subscribe to the show or follow us on LinkedIn. Additionally, check out our newsletter. You can find it at fodh.substack.com. That's fodh.substack.com. Stay tuned. Bye.