The Boston Globe's Future of Medicine Summit: 5 Predictions on Where Healthcare is Heading

Medicine is being rewritten in real time, and most of us are still catching up to what that means for how we prevent, detect, and treat disease. New tools reach patients faster than the guidelines meant to guide them, and that shift set the tone for the Boston Globe's Future of Medicine conference last month. Physicians, researchers, and policy leaders spent the day working through what that means for prevention, care delivery, and how much we're willing to hand over to AI. These are the five predictions from that day we're keeping a pulse on.

1. AI will get better at spotting outbreaks. Deciding who regulates it is the harder problem.

AI's role in predicting and detecting pathogens came up again and again throughout the day, and the optimism in the room was real. The technology is catching signals that human surveillance alone would miss, and it's only going to get sharper. But the same capability cuts both ways. The tools that help detect dangerous pathogens are the same tools that could help someone engineer them, and there was no clear sense of how close we actually are to guardrails that address that.

What stood out most is that the answer may not come from the systems already in place.

The FDA and existing healthcare oversight weren't built for something moving at this pace, and the more likely path forward looks like entirely new regulatory bodies built specifically for AI rather than an update to the old ones. What that looks like in practice is still unclear. The prediction here is that the next few years will be less about what AI can do for pandemic prediction, and more about the slow work of building oversight that can actually keep up with it, especially as public health funding cuts make the infrastructure to act on early warnings harder to sustain.

2. Health monitoring stops being an appointment and starts being constant.

A shift away from periodic checkups toward continuous, AI-enabled monitoring ran through much of the day's conversation. Instead of waiting for a scheduled test or a patient to notice symptoms, AI could track health data in the background and flag when something actually needs attention.

It's an easier future to picture than a comfortable one. There's a real risk of what got called "cognitive surrender," accepting an AI's output because the expertise to question it isn't there, and that risk only grows the more gets handed off to models that claim to be unbiased.

The likely path is that continuous monitoring takes off first in low-stakes settings like general wellness tracking, and moves much more slowly into anything tied to an actual diagnosis or treatment decision, where the cost of a wrong call is higher and the willingness to fully automate is lower.

3. Personalized mRNA cancer vaccines will move toward standard care, if healthcare can figure out how to pay for it.

mRNA cancer vaccines from Moderna and Merck are showing promise for lowering the risk of melanoma recurrence or death by roughly 49%. At the Boston Globe Future of Medicine Summit, Dr. Michelle Brown of Moderna’s Oncology team walked through how personalized vaccines are becoming possible with the adaptability and speed of mRNA technology. Because every tumor carries its own fingerprint, this new generation of vaccines will not only be a tool to manage and treat cancer, but Dr. Toni Choueiri of Dana-Farber and Dr. Vinod Balachandran both agreed that mRNA vaccines will quickly soon become part of standard care and we’ll eventually develop the technology to hopefully prevent cancer occurrence altogether.  

4. More care will start outside the hospital.

When we saw Boston Legacy FC, Boston's professional women's soccer team, on the summit agenda, we were curious. The session challenged our assumptions about what care looks like and where it happens. Healthcare isn't one-size-fits-all, and the future of medicine might not start in a hospital at all. That’s something we’re very close to, partnering with Teladoc Health, largest virtual care company in the world, and Lumeris, who’s bringing AI assistants to primary care teams and their patients.  

Boston Legacy FC is partnering with Collegium Pharmaceutical to reach individuals and families affected by ADHD and other neurodevelopmental conditions. The session described cross-sector collaboration as the key to bringing care into the community and argued how sports organizations have an obligation to create inclusive environments and help move healthcare forward. The idea that stuck with us was "havens," places where people already spend time that bring care to them. We expect more health systems and life science companies to partner with teams, venues and community groups, and more of those partnerships to be pitched as care delivery rather than sponsorship.

5. Prevention will become increasingly personalized, not one-size-fits-all.

The next phase of medicine will move beyond telling everyone to follow the same prevention playbook.

As diagnostics, genetics, environmental data and AI improve, clinicians will be better able to identify which risks matter most for an individual and intervene earlier, potentially before disease develops.

That could fundamentally change what we mean by prevention. Instead of waiting for a patient to develop symptoms or relying on broad recommendations based on age or population-level risk, healthcare could increasingly use a person's individual biology, environment and health data to determine where intervention is most likely to make a difference. The goal is not simply to monitor people more closely, but to understand why someone may be at risk and act before that risk becomes disease.

The challenge will be turning all of that information into care people can actually access and trust. More data does not automatically mean better prevention, and the healthcare system will have to figure out which signals are meaningful, when to act on them and how to make increasingly personalized prevention available beyond those who can afford the most advanced care.

Where this leaves us

We left the summit more hopeful than we arrived.

The science is moving fast, and the conversations in the room showed people are working just as hard on the systems around it.

Regulators are rethinking oversight for AI. Clinicians are working out how to use continuous monitoring without giving up their judgment. Oncologists are preparing for cancer vaccines to become part of routine care. Health systems are finding new ways to reach people where they already are. Prevention is becoming something medicine can actually deliver, and the organizations that help get it to patients have a real opportunity to lead that work.