As the CTO of an academic medical center, I spend much of my time focused on how technology can make healthcare better for our patients and our staff at our hospitals and clinics by simplifying technology interactions, strengthening security, lowering costs without sacrificing resilience, and improving efficiency within today’s payer/provider system.
The World Economic Forum gives me a different lens: technology as a catalyst to transform healthcare at a much larger, global scale and the associated threats and risks.
Last year, the conversations in Davos were about AI proof-of-concepts, “can we do this?”.
This year, the conversations had clearly shifted to deployments, implementations, and scale, “how fast can we do this responsibly?”.
In just 12 months, AI went from feeling raw and experimental to real, powerful, and frankly, unstoppable.
So, what does this mean for healthcare. Well, we’ve talked about “healthcare transformation” for years, but in practice we’ve mostly digitized and optimized the existing model. Think about retail: Walmart and Home Depot optimized stores and increased efficiency through technology implementation (barcode, logistics), but it wasn’t until Amazon that the retail experience was truly transformed. Amazon flipped the model entirely. Customers didn’t need to come to stores; the store came to them. The experience was cheaper, faster, and less stressful.
Healthcare hasn’t had its Amazon moment, yet.
Technology companies understand engagement and scale. Healthcare providers have earned trust and deliver outcomes. The real opportunity now is bringing those strengths together for true transformation.
It won’t happen next week or next year, but slowly there will be changes, and in the nex 5–10 years, I believe healthcare will look fundamentally different than it does today:
1) Healthcare will be continuous, no longer episodic.
Patient will have to their entire medical record, in real-time, and it weill be fully queryable, shifting ownership and agency toward the individual. Continuous streams of data from wearables, labs, imaging, genomics, and remote monitoring will be analyzed in the background. This enables early pattern recognition and intervention long before symptoms become acute—moving healthcare upstream from reactive care to prevention and prediction.
2) The primary interface will be a personal, unique AI advisor/orchestrator/counselor.
This AI persona becomes the front door to the healthcare system, synthesizing data across sources into personalized, actionable guidance. It will coordinate care, prompt behavior change, and escalate to clinicians only when needed. Over time, care becomes more relational than transactional, with trust shifting from institutions to intelligent, patient-aligned agents.
3) Clinicians will become strategic experts, not information gatherers and processors.
As AI absorbs documentation, data aggregation, and first-pass analysis, clinicians can focus on judgment, nuance, and complex decision-making. Their value shifts toward interpretation, ethics, and shared decision-making in high-stakes situations, potentially redefining both clinical satisfaction and training.
4) Care delivery becomes radically decentralized. The default site of care is no longer the hospital or clinic.
Care increasingly happens at home, at work, in retail settings, and virtually. Hospitals evolve into centers for intensive, procedural, and emergency care rather than routine management. Care delivery is designed around patients’ lives, reducing friction while improving adherence, outcomes, and experience.
5) Economics fundamentally change. AI breaks the cost-quality trade-off and healthcare begins to behave like a scalable services industry.
Automation drives marginal costs down for monitoring, triage, and guidance while quality improves through consistent, learning-driven best practices. This opens the door to outcome-based pricing, subscriptions, and long-term value models that were previously unattainable.
6) Access expands dramatically (regionally, nationally, and globally).
Geography becomes far less determinative of care quality as expertise is delivered digitally. Underserved populations gain access to continuous guidance rather than episodic emergency care. While disparities won’t disappear overnight, the ceiling of what’s possible rises significantly.
7) Regulation evolves into continual, contextual oversight.
One-time approvals give way to ongoing monitoring of safety, performance, and bias in real-world use. Oversight becomes dynamic and risk-based, enabling faster innovation while maintaining accountability in continuously learning systems.
8) A new power structure emerges, with system orchestrators becoming the most influential healthcare players.
Value shifts from the traditional healthcare provider to those who control interfaces, data flows, and coordination layers. Orchestrators shape integration, user experience, and how patients move through the continuum of care. Trust, interoperability, and control of the patient relationship become the true strategic battleground.
None of this happens in isolation. Transforming healthcare at this scale will require deep collaboration across providers, payers, technologists, policymakers, regulators, and global partners. No single organization, country, or sector has all the answers, but together, we can shape a future that is more proactive, equitable, and human-centered.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Which of these shifts resonate most, or feel most challenging, from your perspective? Looking forward to the discussion in the comments below.
Christian Lindmark 