Journalist Artur Olesch and Tobias Gantner, CEO of Healthcare Futurists, explore how socio-technological trends from 2026 onward will redefine medicine, patient roles, and medical professions. What forces are shaping the medtech market, from big tech and AI platforms to new preventive care players? What are AVOCA skills that future patients will need, and what does the IKEA-ization of medicine mean for healthcare? A sneak preview of their debate at the ICT&health World Conference, next week (Jan. 27 - 29) in Maastricht.
Artur Olesch: The year 2026 begins turbulently in global politics, and many are pessimistic about the months ahead. But there is a glimmer of optimism. I refer to optimism regarding AI. If we agree with the thesis that we tend to underestimate the long-term impact of technology, what will that impact be on global healthcare, regardless of the health system?
Tobias Gantner: History shows that we tend to underestimate the impact of groundbreaking technologies because everything we cling to and build upon is rooted in an old-world narrative. Few people remember that, as we know it today, surgery simply did not exist before the 1860s. A “good” surgeon was someone who could amputate a limb as quickly as possible, ideally without the patient dying from infection. It was widely believed that operating on the brain or the abdomen would never be possible, simply because patients could not withstand the pain.
Military technicians
Then came anesthesia. With the introduction of this new technology, surgeons moved from being closer to military technicians to the top of the medical pecking order (I mention this partly because I used to be a surgeon myself). Anesthesia was rapidly adopted across healthcare systems worldwide. Yet, as with antibiotics later on, it was not without criticism. Some argued there was no place for such innovations. Consider the resistance Joseph Lister faced when he proposed that unseen agents must be responsible for gangrene, at a time when no one had ever observed bacteria.
I believe healthcare is structurally slow in adopting truly disruptive technologies. This hesitation is systemic because medicine is structured to preserve the status quo in most procedures. Doctors are not free to try whatever they want; we must follow guidelines and good clinical practice. Innovation, therefore, has to prove that it is at least not worse than the existing standard of care.
With AI, many studies will need time to reveal their full potential. We are currently seeing pioneers embark on these scientific journeys. It is unsurprising that early advances occur in radiology and dermatology, where image-based data play a central role. However, my bigger bet is on the evolution of study design itself. Not only on approaches proposed by groups such as Google DeepMind, but on entirely new designs that combine data from multiple sources and go beyond the traditional randomized controlled trial.
To be clear, I am not saying the days of the RCT are over. Instead, I believe we will gain powerful AI-based tools that complement the insights we derive from RCTs. I call this emergence-based medicine: pattern recognition on steroids. It has the potential to uncover blind spots on the medical map and connect them in ways we would not have anticipated.
Linear human mind
Why is this so important? Because the human mind is fundamentally linear. That linearity has served us well – it helped us survive in the wild – but it also comes with bias. Algorithms can be biased, too, of course. But when an algorithm repeatedly analyses large datasets over time, patterns begin to emerge, much like the formations of bird flocks, schools of fish, or the branching of trees. For the first time, we have the opportunity to look nature directly in the eye.
That makes me optimistic. I expect to see meaningful progress within the next five to seven years. This is when we may move from eminence-based medicine to evidence-based medicine, and ultimately toward emergence-based medicine, an approach capable of describing natural phenomena for what they truly are: patterns. This shift could open entirely new paths to understanding disease mechanisms and, ultimately, to discovering new ways to cure them.
Artur Olesch: I completely agree that many people expect AI in healthcare to be a game-changer that solves all problems. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence itself is quietly improving the quality of diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. On a daily basis, we don't recognize that more than 1,250 FDA-approved AI algorithms are already used in diagnostic imaging to predict the risk of health deterioration. The number of scientific studies demonstrating their benefits is increasing rapidly.
AI in healthcare in 2026
The year 2026 promises to be particularly interesting in terms of AI in healthcare: NVIDIA is growing, and the AI bubble has not burst yet, CES 2026 was literally flooded with robots, and OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Health - “a dedicated experience in ChatGPT designed for health and wellness.”
It will enable ChatGPT to be integrated with medical records, thereby allowing AI to personalize health conversations. This is excellent news for patients, as they finally have a health coach to help them navigate the complex healthcare system. What does this mean for physicians and the healthcare system? Is this already a disruption or just an improved Dr. Google?
Tobias Gantner: This means we need to rethink healthcare and the roles we have assigned to job descriptions over the years. Doctors need to understand that the use of AI by a patient is not a narcissistic insult brought upon them or some notorious bad they have to sustain. It is the new norm among the educated and those interested in self-managing their health. I call them digital health pioneers. They are not trying to outsmart their doctors; they are actually already doing so. And I think this is for a good reason.
In Germany and most Western countries, we live in democracies. This means we are responsible for the state in some way, and we are part of the res publica, the public thing, as the Romans called it. This also means we must understand what we do, and that we must have education that will hopefully prevent us from overthrowing the government simply because someone else makes bigger promises. I think we also need to adopt this kind of informed approach to our own health. As we are responsible for the politics exercised by the politicians we voted into office and whom we could consistently demonstrate against, we also bear responsibility for maintaining our own health. A politician to the state is like a doctor to the patient.
Checks and balances
We need checks and balances in both worlds – and since not everyone can go to medical school or read all the publications about specific medical conditions, AI provides a tool to help us reduce complexity and have educated conversations with doctors, or they might, at particular points, contradict what doctors say. That is, where it gets interesting. I have a chart in mind: The x-axis is time, and the y-axis is the level of medical knowledge or the accuracy of medical decision-making. Overall, I think this is relatively horizontal, with some undulations here and there. But in AI, we see the level rise, quietly, as you said before, and I would be interested in understanding: Where do these two lines cross? When is an AI judgment more reliable than a judgment brought forward by a human physician? This is also the point – if it ever comes – where we have to ask ourselves: Do we need to protect patients from possibly wrong decisions by humans in the future, as we do protect them from AI right now? This also assumes that the crossing point has not yet come.
What this all means: We need to reflect on new roles. What is the role of a physician? A scientist, a consultant, a shoulder to cry on, an empathetic person, a healthcare dictionary on two legs – all the above or possibly more. This is also the point where we have to take demographic changes into account, with more patients and fewer doctors, where we have to think about new concepts of nursing, possibly way beyond the physician assistants that we currently see.
I am not sure whether this constitutes a disruption. I would think it is rather not. We manage more data; we compile it, use it in different ways, identify new contexts, and apply it to medical care.
Game changer
The game changer, however, would be developing new research methods and interpreting new datasets that have not been used before. When we try to solve problems that require a plethora of longitudinal data collected over many years to examine the emergence-based connections between, say, infections and cancer, the overall impact of the immune system on how our lives unfold, and how old we get. It is still the Faustian challenge to understand what keeps it all together. I think we are just scratching the surface, but with AI in future stages, we can go ahead and dig much deeper. This is the context in which I like the phrase “drill baby, drill.”
Artur Olesch: I agree that we urgently need to redefine the role of doctors and, on that basis, reform healthcare systems. Some tasks should be transferred to AI, while physicians should focus on areas where human touch is essential – where more time is needed for care, complex decision-making, or motivating patients to adopt preventive behaviors.
However, I doubt that politicians will have the courage to challenge the status quo, even as patient dissatisfaction grows. That said, if AI agents can provide patients with a sense of security, empathetic interactions, and easy access to support, acceptance will follow quickly. The human brain is wired to conserve energy and seek shortcuts, an impulse that also helps explain the success of drugs like Ozempic.
Healthcare providers and medical professionals will have to adapt. As AI combines medical records with environmental and lifestyle data, patients will gain a deeper understanding of their own health and receive more personalized guidance. Still, I do not believe this will significantly reduce demand for medical services. Patients will continue to seek human confirmation, prescriptions, or sick notes. Too many structural mechanisms reinforce the current order.
At the same time, we focus heavily on AI because it is a fashionable topic, while underestimating other social shifts. Younger generations increasingly learn about health through social media, often trusting medical influencers who promise quick fixes more than their own doctors. This erodes trust in the medical profession and shows how greater access to information can paradoxically worsen health outcomes.
We are facing a broader crisis of trust in healthcare—one compounded by severe financial pressure. In 2025, the French healthcare system's deficit alone reached approximately €22 billion. Yet I fear that meaningful reform will come only after a more profound crisis, such as a severe shortage of doctors. It brings to mind the meme of a dog calmly drinking coffee while everything burns around him, saying: “It’s fine.”
To conclude: how should doctors and healthcare institutions prepare for the social transformation driven by AI?
Tobias Gantner: It would be interesting to rethink the positions and roles doctors took in the past. What was a doctor’s job? Where did that person and that role actually come from? What role did they have in society, and what are people expecting from it in the not-so-distant future? From demi-god to digital-goon?
Doctors derive from the figure of the healer, and this is not only reflected in having textbook knowledge learned by heart, ready to spit out at any time of the day, that can easily be reproduced by some machine! It is also foremost the empathy they bring towards their patients and those who seek advice. I guess going back to the past is an asset for getting a glimpse of the future, as they say. If you want to learn something new, read an old book – and this is true not only in healthcare but in many operations where smart automation dawns on the horizon and the fear of unpredictable change lingers, disrupting everything so dear to our hearts in the old days.
Innovation leadership
We need a remedy for this: it is innovation leadership, and this comes with specific knowledge and attitude. To me, the key lies in the so-called future skills. They have a basis in understanding the most elementary ingredients of capabilities, such as reading, writing, mathematics, logic, knowledge of how languages work, and concepts of philosophy. Those are skills we should have learned and cherished in school, as seen from the perspective of someone applying for a job. The next level is the humanities, such as art, music, and literature, which build self-efficacy and cannot be done without a solid foundation in the previously mentioned skills, and on top of that are the AVOCA skills, as I call them: Agility, Vision-Mindset, Openness, Creativity, and Ambiguity Tolerance. This is what we will need to navigate the future: the captain on deck must ensure the line of command works well, not only in the ballroom but also in the machine deck. We need this not only to navigate what we are thrown into, but also to create the world we want to live in.
Technology is again changing the way our societies and complex systems work – and it may have done so throughout human history. Think of the introduction of writing, the mobile letters, and the internet. In principle, again, nothing to be afraid of, but something we need to be able to manage.
I think it is time to realize that security is just a concept; it does not actually exist. It is a concept in our head, like hope and freedom. All of which are very tempting. What we need is radical acceptance of what is and what is not, and then we need to build on that. I might be led into temptation to give our society a diagnosis: We are in the state of palliative care. Recent polls in Germany that ask about trust in politics and whether politicians can solve healthcare problems point to a daunting 13%. This means 87 % think we will not be able to fix the broken healthcare system. Are we waiting for a wonder to happen, or have we given up? We are in awe because things are changing – and we are afraid that they might change for the worse. I hate to break the news: There is no insurance against the downsides of a general future. Fear of the future, to me, is something like paying interest for a loan you possibly never will pick up from the bank. As a physician, I would issue a prescription: „Courage in high doses, 3 times per day.” This is why I love organizing and running hackathons. The attitude is: We build the bridge when we get there. It is not: we have a regulation in place before the technology is mature.
Here's what I think: we need to prepare for tectonic shifts in healthcare. Recently, the president of Bavaria said he would dissolve the joint organizations responsible for healthcare provision, especially in rural areas, and appoint a government official. The Kassenärztliche Vereinigung (KV, Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians) has performed poorly for many years now, and mayors have filed high complaints about its rigidity towards innovation. I guess, this politician's sentiment is testing the waters to see how well such an idea would be received – not only in Bavaria – because chances are we will see a far-right government next year in some federal states of Germany, who would, in my opinion, wait to use this populist measure to show their voters that change is actually possible.
I am not sure whether getting rid of joint administration will solve any problems, but it is a stark signal to the established system. But it speaks a clear language. We still have the power to drastically change the system if needed. This kind of courage, to me, is much better than holding on to things and solutions that, in the past, did not solve the problem. And yes, as democrats, we need to talk about the consequences, but then we have to install consequences we can later talk about. This is much better than having a discussion following more discussions. As Erasmus of Rotterdam once said, we will measure them on their deeds and not their words.
The world is changing
Artur Olesch: I like your reference to the tectonic shift in healthcare that we need to prepare for. For several years now, it has been clear that the world is changing and will continue to change dramatically. The geopolitical situation has not been as turbulent as it is today for decades. The stability provided by transatlantic cooperation has ended, and everyone understands that, even after a change of government in the US, there will be no return to the previous status quo.
The war in Ukraine has reminded us that peace is not a given. Social media has intensified social divisions, and access to knowledge, despite its enormous benefits, has also enabled the spread of alternative, often erroneous information without meaningful constraints. That is why I fully agree with you that change must start with education, beginning as early as kindergarten.
You mention AVOCA skills, which fit perfectly with the world we live in, defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Healthcare will become even more complex than it already is. In addition to traditional healthcare providers, new service providers will enter the ecosystem, including major technology companies. Hundreds of prevention-focused agents will emerge, alongside new healthcare players such as Prenuvo, Ezra, and Neko Health (founded by Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek), which offer preventive full-body scans.
Soon, every medical record will include DNA data, forcing us to decide whether lifestyle changes are worth the effort to reduce the genetic risk of developing specific diseases. This is compounded by the growing focus on longevity and a social trend that increasingly frames health as a measure of performance and social value.
The IKEA-ization of medicine
Today, we complain that navigating the healthcare system is complicated. Yet these are systems in which our agency is limited, with most decisions made for us by institutions and doctors. With the rise of virtual health services and the shift of responsibility toward the patient, what I call the IKEA-ization of medicine, we will increasingly have to manage our own health. AI agents will support us, but the final decisions and lifestyle changes will remain our responsibility.
This level of patient empowerment requires awareness, critical thinking, and the foundational knowledge you mentioned. We need to know whom to trust, whether medical influencers on social media or health agents, and how to critically interpret their recommendations. Soon, our personal health knowledge may exceed that of our doctors, who typically have access only to fragmented information contained in electronic medical records. In contrast, our smartphones, smartwatches, and smart homes continuously collect data that offers a far more accurate picture of how we feel and behave, and can even predict future health problems.
Laboratories may soon lose their monopoly on blood parameter testing as new generations of smart devices begin to continuously monitor these values. The role of doctors will shift accordingly. They will help us design our future health and intervene in emergencies that no algorithm can anticipate. Doctors will become architects of health rather than technicians repairing damage once disease, often developing silently for years, finally becomes visible due to a lack of data.
More human support
This transformation also represents an opportunity. In a world increasingly shaped by technology and algorithms, people will need more human support to help them navigate their health. There will always be individuals who remain passive consumers of healthcare services, as psychological theory suggests that some people operate with an external locus of decision making. Others, due to physical or mental health conditions, will require support and cannot be expected to take the initiative in health-related matters.
Finally, a note of optimism. In her book The Future, futures researcher Florence Gaub argues that we perceive the future more positively when we feel we can influence it. As we gain more tools to manage our health and thus more control over it, our perception of the healthcare system will change. This creates a real opportunity to implement the long-awaited reforms necessary in light of the challenges ahead, from workforce shortages to healthcare budget crises.
