The Futurist

By Mike Miliard, Managing Editor

For all the progress healthcare has made with regard to technology, there's so much further we can go, says Daniel Kraft, MD.

 

"Because there's so much unmet need, we have so many technologies that are sort of layering up," says Kraft, a physician, biomedical researcher, inventor, entrepreneur, Stanford faculty member, pilot and flight surgeon with an F-16 Squadron of the California Air National Guard.

 

Kraft chairs the medicine track for Singularity University, which was founded by futurist Ray Kurzweil to speed the understanding and deployment of boundary-pushing technologies, and he's the founder of Exponential Medicine, a yearly conference (the next one is in November, in San Diego) that explores emerging and convergent technologies that can transform healthcare.

 

Electronic health records are only the very beginning. So many other technologies are poised to fundamentally alter care delivery, says Kraft – pointing to one instance of how disparate technologies have come together to upend another industry.

 

"I like to use the example of Uber," he says. "They didn't invent the cell phone, they didn't invent maps, they didn't invent online payments, they didn't invent GPS. They layered it up smartly to drastically disrupt the taxi and limo world. If that kind of thinking is applied to healthcare, it can help things dramatically improve."

 

If Kraft is about anything, it's about fusing different technologies and modes of thought to work toward an essential rethinking of the way healthcare is done in this country. 

 

"One of the good things about being here in Silicon Valley, with so many people from across the world that are innovators and thinkers, it's a convergence point for reinventing or reimagining elements of health and biomedicine, so many of which are broken today across many different systems," he says.

 

We're at an inflection point, that has been a long time in coming, says Kraft – who's been infatuated with technology's potential impact on this historically tech-averse industry since he first got his MD. 

 

"I remember when I was a med student, Apple's Newton had come out – I was thinking, 'Wow this would be so perfect for bringing in patient information to the clinical team,'" he said. "I was a technology geek. I had, in 1990, I think, the first Wizard from Sharp. It was a little hand-held calculator and pocket computer. And a Hewlett Packard 200LX as a resident – just a little computer from HP that many folks started to use to keep records and medical information."

 

Fast-forward to 2014, where mobile devices are ubiquitous and the apps that run on them get more creative and transformative every day.

 

"I think we're at a point now where there's a lot of potential given the somewhat exponential trends of smaller, cheaper, faster and better technologies. When you mash them up, interesting things can happen," says Kraft. "Google Glass is an example of that. It's a lot of technologies that you wear on your head, and probably the best use case now is in healthcare – from the OR to being a paramedic to being a nurse."

 

From artificial intelligence to genomics to predictive analytics, Kraft is excited about the future – especially about the ways connected new technologies are "engaging and empowering the patient, and enabling these new feedback tools to shift us from where healthcare has been forever, which is intermittent and reactive (to) continuous and proactive," he says.

 

"What started as the quantified self, is merging into the Internet of Things – that will take us from big data to really actionable information for the individual and the clinician," says Kraft. "That's going to drive value-based behaviors and outcomes, and hopefully align some of the often very-misaligned incentives that we have in healthcare."

 

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