The Distant Future of Healthcare - 2026

A good survey from the folks at McKinsey on GenAI in healthcare.

As expected:

- the majority are pursuing Gen AI now

- it has positive applications in at least a dozen areas

- this train has left the station and is never coming back

Three things that are not in this report and may actually be more important:

I. Olympic Track Metaphor

At some point, someone is going to remind us that this is a marathon, not a sprint. The only thing wrong with that is that it is completely wrong.

This is more like a series of 400M relays. This tech is moving faster than anything we have ever seen simply because it is high-impact and easy to adopt, and oceans of money are going into growing and improving this tech space.

Get your relay teams set up. The race has already begun. It will continue with sprints and hand-offs for two years.

II. Future Look Back

Looking back from the distant future, like 2026, there will be much wreckage because of three major failures:

1. The Foundation

Foundational IT and change management remained an undermanaged, under-resourced, low-talent mess while we pursued the shiny object of Gen AI. We ended up with pockets of brilliance and a new layer of tech overhead. This is while some competitors have moved to a new platform, model, internal clock speed, and market agility. There is no 2026 scenario where you are bad at IT and Change Management and comparatively good at GenAI.

2. Culture

We assumed we were okay culture-wise and realized too late that while we talked excitedly about change and innovation, we didn't do the actual work to ensure our culture was primed/capable of a big acceleration in change and innovation. Most C suites cannot tell you how you do this or even what it means in pragmatic terms. Driving change, swimming upstream against your actual culture versus what you have on your posters and in your flowery mission statement, is a fool's errand.

Can you run this relay race for two years?

The majority of IT shops play mostly defense. That is largely the fault of the CEO and the board, which are anchored in how they are managed and where they fit in the strategy and strategy processes at your firm. Defense will not work in this unique and accelerating period. Half the CIOs are below average, and it is a very tough job.

3. Talent

In this area, the game is changing. This requires different talent. Good, personable, high verbal leaders are not enough. You would never take a top cricket player and assume they would be great as the game changes to rugby. It isn't a wholesale change, but it isn't nothing either.

I like a concept called Journey Talent, mostly because I invented it. If you are going on a new journey, take some talent that has been on that journey before, scattered amongst leadership and in the trenches. Really listen to them.

The hardest part of this is exiting some top cricket players who have served you so very well and explaining to them they can't stay because it's now rugby. I have done that several times, and HR usually goes bonkers if they haven't been inside the tent from the beginning.

When you do a strategy refresh and create a slightly different mission and path forward, you will have new and different macro-level tasks to achieve that. This requires new talent for these new tasks. There is no scenario where magically, somehow, you already have the right talent mix.

III. Big Bad Bifurcation

In 2026 and beyond you will have healthcare firms that are proactive, preventative, predictive, pattern-matched, process performant, precise, permissioned, pragmatic, personalized, and peer/community connected because they adopted the new tech well. Toby's 10Ps.

Which healthcare facility do you want to go to, the 10Ps one or the old one? Which one do you want to work at and or invest in?

Those who fumble this and do half-measures will not compete well in purely clinical outcome terms or in financial performance.

All that ends badly, but honestly, the current healthcare landscape is a rat's nest of inefficiencies, stupid wasteful inequities, bad design, profit conflicts, and antiquated thinking/architecture. The bright spots are the dedicated people and the occasional breakthrough standouts. The good news about that mess is that it has inherent profit pools that will fund change.

I know that sounds harsh. Think of a whiteboard the size of Soldier Field (da Bears). On the right side, we have all the consumer options, elements, treatments, venues, and outcomes for healthcare. On the far left side, we have all of the providers and the ecosystems that go with it. Now imagine the map and diagram inbetween those two that shows provisioning, distribution, payment, planning etc. It honestly looks like a team of evil geniuses spent decades intentionally making it a mess.

It's just as bad outside of US. The NHS in the UK is no one's favorite. Somewhere, around 40% of people on waiting lists wait more than 18 weeks. A 40,000-person staffing shortage snuck up on them. Professional pay is at a level equivalent to kicking the ball in your own net (apt soccer metaphor, given the oddly paralleled performance of England recently in that domain). Moving further afield, and the upside opportunities are legion. Madagascar, the entire country, has a total of zero pediatric doctors.

The positive side of this bifurcation not only delivers better patient outcomes but also better asset utilization (human and capital), lower operating costs (reduced errors, rework, smart process), and better cycle times. It is also a more agile platform to embrace and leverage further change.

I wasn't the smartest person at biz school, but better outcomes, cost structure, agility, and financial performance seem like a good combo.

This will be on the back of rethinking models and positive adoption of GenAI, as well as the ecosystem that comes with it and the less shiny but important tech changes happening in parallel. Four that are here now that give you a glimpse of that future:

• Pediatric Moonshot and federated AI.

• VANTIQ and its intelligent, active fabric

• Dreamscape Learn and its potential for education, training and continual upskilling;

• Arvizio and intelligent AR integration for your entire facility/set of machines.

There's More

Lastly, just to pile on, there is a tsunami of scientific breakthroughs coming that will move out of the scientific domain and into healthcare functionally faster than they ever have: bioinformatics, synbio, metabolic health, regenerative medicine, broader biotech, computational neurobiology, the descendants of CRISPR CAS 9, the Alpha Fold brilliance, nanoengineering, robotics, the massive AI infusion into 20 disciplines including material science...

Conclusion

So, some wonderful things are heading our way as healthcare consumers, but in big creative destruction cycles, very few firms think they will be on the destruction side of that, which, in actuality, helps them end up there.