Preparing for Healthcare’s Digital Renaissance

In 10 years, healthcare will look very different. Your smartwatch picks up on something "off" at midnight. Maybe your heart rate or blood sugar has taken a subtle but worrying turn. Before you even wake up, your doctor is alerted. By breakfast, the right medication is at your door, your insurance has approved the claim and a friendly AI assistant calmly explains what’s happening in plain language.

This isn’t a far-off dream. The data and technology to make it happen already exist. What’s uncertain is whether our systems, and the people who run them, will have the vision to actually use it this way.

From Mountains Of Data To Meaningful Care

Healthcare already generates more data than almost any other sector—about 30% of the world’s total and growing at a 36% CAGR. Most of this data never touches patient care. Data points often sit unused. We don’t have a data problem; we have a data utilization problem. What good is infinite data if it doesn’t know when to flag a silent heart attack?

This disconnect has become one of the defining limitations of modern healthcare systems. Care has stayed rooted in episodic visits, with data pulled together only at discrete moments. This is why so many critical decisions in healthcare still get made without a complete picture. It's why your primary care doctor might not see what your specialist recorded or why wearable data that could have flagged an early problem stays buried in an app.

The Building Blocks Of ‘Healthcare live’

The good thing is that this is beginning to change. I believe we are living through the early years of what could be described as a digital renaissance in healthcare. Intelligence, infrastructure and intent are finally moving in sync and redefining how we understand illness, deliver treatments and experience care itself.

A very different architecture, built around live data exchange, adaptive workflows and machine reasoning anchored in clinical reality, is taking shape. Systems are being rebuilt to sense, decide and respond with far less human mediation. Data is now reaching the systems that can act on it—enabling care responses that aren’t delayed by process bottlenecks.

Take diabetes care. Abbott’s Libre continuous glucose monitors can send readings directly into medical records, giving doctors a live view of your health without extra paperwork or scheduling delays. It means care doesn’t wait for scheduling and data turns into decisions right when it matters.

In drug development, too, processes that once took over a decade and billions of dollars have compressed dramatically, slashing timelines and costs. AI models like AlphaFold have "accurately predicted the shapes of all 200 million proteins known to science in under a year." This is acceleration at a scale we’ve never had before.

Until recently, the cost of intelligence was a barrier to advanced insights. That’s no longer the case. Today, intelligence isn’t just smarter; it’s radically more affordable. With the changing economics, it’s no longer technology that’s slowing us down. In many cases, it’s the organizations and policies that now need to catch up.

The Risk Of Building A High-Tech Replica Of The Past

Here’s where the opportunity becomes a caution. Too often, organizations treat digital transformation as simply installing new tools on top of old ways of working. They digitize existing paperwork, plug in an algorithm and hope it magically multiplies value.

It rarely does. Because the core hasn’t changed: how care is organized, how people are incentivized, how trust is built. Without rethinking these foundations, all the technology in the world won’t fix the fragmentation that keeps data—and patients—from being seen fully.

The Work Ahead

As the pace of change accelerates, it shrinks the window CEOs and boards have to get their data strategy, trust frameworks and financial models in sync. This is where I see heritage and innovation standing side by side, bridging long-standing medical wisdom with bold new approaches. It’s how we’ll move from a fragmented ecosystem to one that’s connected and from generic one-size-fits-all treatments to truly personal care for each of us.

Here is what we will need to do to shape the next decade of healthcare:

1. Don’t digitize old problems.
   

   It’s easy to install AI on top of legacy structures, but it's difficult to redesign the core of how care is delivered day-to-day. Can we rethink the current processes? Can we reassess how work is organized and how trust is maintained in an increasingly automated environment?

2.  Prioritize domain-specific context over generic AI platforms.
   

   In a high-stakes environment like healthcare, general-purpose large language models (LLMs) fall short. What we need are systems built from the inside out with healthcare logic—domain knowledge, regulatory boundaries, patient variability and ethical frameworks—embedded from the start, not layered on top.

3. Put trust at the center.
   

   In healthcare, trust isn’t optional. If doctors don’t trust a new tool, they won’t use it. If patients don’t feel secure, they’ll ignore its advice. Trust grows when systems are transparent. That’s why we need to bake in explainability, accountability and safeguards from day one by design.

The Leaders Of Tomorrow

We’re already seeing signs of this future taking shape. Kaiser Permanente ties its incentives directly to patient health outcomes and reducing disparities. U.S. regulators want Medicare and Medicaid to be fully operating under value-based care models by 2030. Even Amazon’s healthcare push is built on systems that can effortlessly plug into each other.

These moves all point to the fact that tomorrow’s advantage won’t come from locking away data or building black-box algorithms. It will come from knowing how to share information safely across players, so patients get better, faster, more tailored care.

In that sense, healthcare’s digital renaissance isn’t really a story about technology at all. It’s a test of vision and the courage to build systems worthy of the incredible possibilities already at hand.

Also published on Forbes.com