What's Up with Tech?
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With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Convergence: How NextMed Health Is Reimagining Healthcare's Possibilities
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At the convergence of breakthrough technologies, visionary thinking, and human ingenuity lies healthcare's most promising future. Dr. Daniel Kraft's NextMed Health stands as a beacon for those looking to navigate this dynamic landscape, offering a unique gathering unlike conventional healthcare conferences.
"We're at an inflection point with health and medicine," shares Dr. Kraft, painting a vivid picture of healthcare transformation powered by generative AI, robotics, and multi-omics. Rather than focusing solely on technology, NextMed Health emphasizes the human connections and cross-disciplinary collaborations necessary to make healthcare more accessible, equitable, and personalized for all.
The intimate setting at the historic Hotel Del Coronado creates the perfect environment for meaningful exchange. While massive healthcare conventions scatter attendees across sprawling venues, NextMed Health deliberately fosters close connections between pediatricians and technologists, AI specialists and clinicians, entrepreneurs and healthcare systems. This approach has yielded remarkable results - Moderna presented their groundbreaking mRNA technology at the conference in 2015, years before becoming a household name during the pandemic. Virtual reality platforms that once seemed futuristic now train surgeons worldwide.
What truly distinguishes NextMed Health is its forward-looking perspective. "You can't build for 2025," Dr. Kraft emphasizes, "You need to build for 2030 and 2035." The conference opens with "Exponentials 101," bringing everyone up to speed on developments across healthcare's technological frontier, from AI to genomics. Afternoon deep-dive workshops tackle specific applications - hospital-to-home care, AI-enabled mental health solutions, next-generation tools for global health - where participants actively collaborate rather than passively consume information.
Join trailblazers like Ray Kurzweil, Eric Topol, and Dean Kamen at NextMed Health this March 13-16. Register now at nextmedhealth.com and become part of healthcare's most dynamic community shaping our collective future.
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NextMedHealth what's now, what's near, what's next. Imagine the future, don't just imagine it. Help build it with a collaborative, forward-thinking community at the convergence of ideas, arts, science and possibility. To reach a future of medicine, we need to sometimes change our limiting beliefs. Sometimes the challenge isn't the new ideas, it's escaping from the old ones. So you're going to get an update on the cutting edge of accelerating technologies, from AI and robotics, 3d printing, digital health, synthetic biology and quantum computing to blockchain, augmented reality, to what's happening with chatbots, drones, psychedelics and beyond. So at NextMed Health, we bring together the instigators, the forward thinkers sometimes the folks who are a little behind the curve as well, to see the art of the possible what's now, what's near and what's next, and to help bring what's next in ways that are more empowering to the patient, to clinicians, communities and healthcare systems around the world to the patient, to clinicians, communities and healthcare systems around the world, and not just the what's new, but the how to. How to really bring change across healthcare ecosystems. We're lucky to have the most incredible faculty at NextMed Health, from patients and academics to startup founders, clinicians and innovators of all stripes. We expect our participants, many of whom could be giving keynote speeches themselves, to roll up their sleeves, to share their learnings, to meet new people, to get out of their own mindsets, to cross-fertilize and to build an innovation ecosystem that can really help us across the care paradigm. So the NextBed Innovation Lab is a really special place. We have over 60 startups, from seed stage just out of a garage or a lab, to those from Fortune 50 companies, showing off what's really cutting edge. You get to experience things in the Innovation Lab and have a hands-on feel for a future that's already here but just not evenly distributed.
Speaker 1:The Hotel Del Coronado is a bit of our secret sauce. It's an amazing 150-year-old beachside resort near San Diego. It's close to the airport, it's close to the city, but it feels far away. We're a bit sequestered there and able to use the incredible location for everything from beachside bonfires to our famous silent disco and to other activities that spark human connection and discovery. Nextmed Health isn't just about the science or the medicine. It's about the power of the human spirit and discovery. Nextmed Health isn't just about the science or the medicine. It's about the power of the human spirit and creativity. So let's imagine the future together, collaboratively. Please join us this March 13th to 16th for NextMed Health to innovate and to solve the grand challenges of healthcare for all of us, challenges of healthcare for all of us Well, and we have the man, the legend himself here today.
Speaker 3:Dr Daniel Kraft.
Speaker 4:How are you Great to be with you.
Speaker 2:That sounds great I want to go, I'm great, I'm here as do we, and the countdown is on. We're about two weeks away, so this is a last call to action, and that video was from a couple of years ago. It's only gotten more interesting since then. Give us State of the Union on NextMedHealth why we're all so excited today.
Speaker 3:Well, you know, we're at this sort of inflection point with health and medicine and the opportunity to sort of reimagine it. I'm here actually speaking to you from Stanford Medical School. I just gave a talk to a whole center of pediatricians looking to innovate in pediatrics. But whatever the field is, we're now at this point where there's an opportunity to reinvent it right as convergence of, of course, gen AI to robotics, multi-omics, to kind of rethink and make healthcare more accessible or more equitable and more precise and personalized. And that takes a team spirit. You don't just need pediatricians or technologists or AI people, you need to bring them all together. And that's the spirit of NextMed Health is sort of see what's now near next and to catalyze that future for all of us.
Speaker 4:That's fantastic and, of course, Evan and I have attended in the past and this video just brought us right back into that amazing space, that great community. So, speaking specifically about emerging technologies there are so many of them in healthcare Is there a particular innovation that you are most excited about?
Speaker 3:Well, everyone's excited about Gen, AI and GPT, but I'm more excited about this idea of generative health, this idea that each of us will have our own sort of personalized agent that's based on and modifies based our age, culture, language, personality type, health journey goals.
Speaker 3:That's going to be always on looking at our digitome and our underlying genomics, helping us be that health coach uh, both a health coach and also an early diagnostician and guide, in collaboration with our clinicians and health systems in public health and global health. I think that's on the cusp of really becoming quite amazing and democratizing a lot of health and access. And that means that we need to connect the dots because the technology by itself doesn't work without regulatory and reimbursement and ethics. But it's an exciting time in this sort of new health age. We also have grand challenges with funding, with health access med health you can come in person. We also have a live stream as well that you can tap into. It really helps open people's eyes to what's already here, because many people have no idea what's already possible and then how to cross-connect and solve the challenges in health and medicine with new perspectives and new partners.
Speaker 2:Well, it's wonderful and you're such an optimist. Half glass full. I'm a pessimist, I'm glass always half empty. But in any case, you know what are the challenges, the hurdles preventing you know these digital health technologies from scaling and being adopted faster, and how do you see these being overcome through communities like NextMed.
Speaker 3:Well, number one. Nextmed is not just a digital health conference. It's everything from CRISPR to mental health. It's a whole convergence and digital health is an intersection of all that. But often it's about understanding who you're serving right.
Speaker 3:There's so many different, scattered health care systems in the United States, many of which are dysfunctional. They're different than the NHS or the VA or Kaiser, which are pay viders and they're incentivized to do prevention. We don't practice evidence-based medicine or person-based medicines. You need to understand what the incentives are. So sometimes you might have a great solution. It might be a mental health app that treats kids with a video game for ADHD. That's just difficult to get physicians to prescribe it and get it paid for. That actually exists. It's now over the counter. There's examples of.
Speaker 3:You might have a smart connected blood pressure cuff, but how does that data get back into your cardiologist or primary care or nurse's workflow so they can see if a patient has a big spike in blood pressure and need to adjust their meds before they have a stroke or heart attack? So it's often not the technology but the systems, the workflow, payment models and um. So that's part of the cross-collaboration, what you'll learn at next man healthy. You'll see what's working at khalid out of tel aviv or something out of asia or africa. In many cases, things are leapfrogging, leapfrogging the traditional markets and I'm going to come back to the west, after they've been proven out, where there's not a lobby who's incentivized to keep things where they were that's a great segue.
Speaker 4:You painted a picture of the potentially near future, these amazing technologies that will be empowered by AI and wearables, et cetera. You just talked about challenges to adoption of these NextMath Health's been happening for a few years now. So from the past, can you give us an example? Or from like near future, like right now, an example of a practical health technology breakthrough that is actually already being implemented, despite the barriers, despite a variety of challenges?
Speaker 3:We've seen lots of things early at NextMed Health. This was called exponential medicine from 2013 to 2019. Moderna there with mRNA technology in 2015. No one had really heard of that and obviously that had significant applications for the pandemic and even mRNA vaccines for Alzheimer's, to cancers. We had early versions of VR, AR, XR right. Some of our surgeons at their hands on Google Glass 10 years ago now brought mixed reality to the operating room. So you'll see things a bit early that it becomes standard. Companies like Omada Health were there in their baby days, as well as folks like Livongo that sold for billions of dollars.
Speaker 3:So part of the challenge and opportunity for all of us who want to improve healthcare is to get a taste of what's happening a bit early so you can architect your health system, your personal health, out of your community to appreciate that things are moving quickly. You can't build for 2025. You need to build for 2030 and 2035. And it's harder to predict the future now, but we're going to have humanoid body robots. We're going to have our digital tome, our blood pressure cuff and blood sugar from our smartwatches pretty soon, without blood or a cuff. We're going to have humanoid embodied coaches that are with us in our journeys and understand us. So again, the art of the possible is already pretty incredible. The trick is to connect those dots from all these different conversion fields to solve for health span, longevity, early diagnostics, better therapies and public and global health.
Speaker 2:Brilliant. So you're sort of the antidote to the big health tech conferences that kind of dominate the landscape today. Yeah, you know, focus, small personal community. You have so many innovators and startups at NextMedHealth. Is there one or two favorite children you want to call out Because you know there's so many you're associated with?
Speaker 3:Well, I mean we've had examples of companies there like 10 years ago, like there were kids out of a Berkeley studio. Echo Stethoscope had one because I showed it to my dog. That was a great demo early. Now they're, you know, almost in lots of clinicians' pockets. It's a smart stethoscope, for example. That's one example. We had virtual reality that seemed like they're games then but now are being applied like OsoVR, to train surgeons and medical students to do procedures, kind of blending the video game world.
Speaker 3:Other favorite children. It's hard to have favorite children, but seeing where personal genomics and CRISPR were going, 10 years ago we barely had CRISPR announced. Now we have gene therapies, that you will have a patient who's cured from sickle cell with crisper on stage, um, so there's children. I think part of the opportunity is, um, that we all need to bring, bring everybody together and different.
Speaker 3:Some of these larger conferences. You know thousands and thousands of people and nextman health. You're going to get a real taste the first half day as exponentials 101 that's happening in ai and robotics and digital manufacturing and genetics etc. That kind of gets you up to speed with where things are. We'll even have a pre-conference workshop on AI for health leaders and others. And then, following that, we do deeper dives in what's the application of hospital to home or AI-enabled mental health, what's happening in neurotech and brain-computer interfaces or next-generation tools for public and global health. So we sort of connect the dots and you get that through line there, unlike being scattered between 10 stages and having thousands of exhibitors, and so we get that flavor of getting up to speed.
Speaker 3:And then we have deep-dive workshops in the afternoon where people can really discuss and mingle for the applications for new forms of mental health, whether it's with chatbots, drones, psychedelics, to nanotech, and that's where the magic often happens. And plus, it's a special spot at the Hotel Del Coronado. It just got renovated after 100-plus years and that's that spirit of the clever optimist with technology and community that really sparks, I think, what comes next. And we've had one of my favorite children, Tony Young, who runs entrepreneurship and innovation for the NHS, came for a few years and from that he built out this NHS clinician entrepreneurs program and we had several of them come last year and share what they were doing. That's scaling innovation and clinicians and opportunity inside the NHS to some of the programs. Great, great, great examples.
Speaker 4:Well, daniel, you're a physician entrepreneur yourself, perhaps Great, great examples. Well, daniel, you're a physician entrepreneur yourself. You're a convener of people, you're a connector of dots, among other things. What advice would you offer healthcare professionals or entrepreneurs who are looking to stay ahead of healthcare tech trends in the coming years? What can they do besides just coming into the conference at NextMed Helz? What's your advice?
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, I'm specialized. I train in internal medicine, pediatrics and hematology, oncology and bone marrow transplant. But the exciting things often happen at the interfaces and as we get more and more specialized, we'll go to our specialist conferences. Ask for ASCO for oncologists, cardiologists, go to ACC. Every field has this little niche, which is great. But I think as clinicians and as innovators, as humans and as patients, we need to sort of keep our aperture open, because often it's the most interesting things from the gamification of healthcare to lessons from aviation to new forms of digital manufacturing that really scale and spark new solutions, because we can often see problems but now we can solve them in new ways at this cross-collaborative point, and that's kind of what happens at NextMed Health.
Speaker 3:So I encourage people to often cross-fertilize. That's part of the power of our community. It's not just a once a year event. We have community and other elements that'll happen through the year. It's seeing pain primes and solving them, not with the technology today, but with what is coming next, and getting appreciation for that and also trying what's already out there. I have a platform called digitalhealth. That's literally the website with 5,000 digital health solutions that already exist that many folks don't know about, that they could apply to their own health, to their practices, to their hospital systems. So it's often connecting the dots about what's already here. You know the future's already here, just not evenly distributed. You'll see a lot of that at NextMed Health. I think all of us can be sort of intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs and catalysts to sort of see a challenge in healthcare locally for yourself, your friends, your family, and solve for them in new ways, with community and with you know, convergent thinking.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love that. So what's the final call to action here for attending NextMed Health? If you're an individual, perhaps you run an innovation practice or an entrepreneur what are the different opportunities to participate or showcase your technology or even speak?
Speaker 3:Well one. Go to nextmanhealth. You can learn all the details. We have an amazing program from folks like Dean Kamen to Larry Brilliant, jennifer Garrison doing women's longevity to Amir Dan Rubin he used to run one medical in Stanford. We have an amazing faculty. And then we have you can see the program there. It's pretty dense and it's not made for just, you know, doctors or nurses or patients or pharma or payers. It's anybody who's interested in seeing what the cutting edge is and what's next. And then we have the innovation lab. The innovation lab is focused on startups, from baby startups to, you know, next generation into a surgical robots, where you can kind of see the future a little bit early and see and meet startups, a little startup competition. So if you have an amazing startup or company you want to be highlighted there, you can go to our innovation lab.
Speaker 3:We have a couple of spaces we're holding for kind of special folks and there's some of our. Eric Topol, one of the amazing physician scientists and leaders, will be there. Katrina Jameson doing work out of stem cell, stem cell work out of UCSD it's really an amazing faculty. Ray Kurzweil, the futurist of futurists, is going to be speaking. The chief medical officer for Microsoft, david Rue, lucien Engeland, from the Netherlands, bringing the European perspective, and so that's kind of part of the magic, bio Dr Bio, who's doing a lot of work on the interface of health and equity.
Speaker 3:I won't go on for all the amazing faculty, but go to nextmedhealth check it out. It's still time to register, but not much time left to book your hotel at the Hotel Del Coronado. And again, if you or someone from your organization, your company, should join us and you can't send them along and have them report back, because you need to have these sort of future finders to get you out of your sometimes the challenges and the new ideas it's escaping from the old ones and we all need to kind of do that, uh, collaboratively and, uh, everyone at next med health well.
Speaker 2:It's a blockbuster event, very excited for you and the whole organization and, uh, for everyone listening. You know, reach out, engage, follow dan, follow Daniel on his various social profiles. You're still on X, on LinkedIn and elsewhere, and congratulations on nurturing and building this amazing community over the years. Thanks so much for stepping out of your Stanford talk to give us an update.
Speaker 3:Well, I appreciate you guys. It's been key for many years and these social connections is often the spark. Sometimes folks have seen a tweet and then they make a connection, and that's often through you. You made an amazing job of expanding knowledge in all sorts of technology spheres and you guys are great examples of convergent thinkers from the IT and the media world to all forms of technologies and insights, and I appreciate what you guys are doing and I'm proud to have you as part of the NextMedHealth community, so we'll see you All right.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much, daniel. Thanks everyone for listening and watching and participating in person if possible.
Speaker 4:Take care everyone, thanks so much I love this community. Thank you, daniel, take care. Bye-bye.