Healthcare And AI 2025: “Dr. Robot Will See You Now”
The Jetsons, a 1960s cartoon featured “Rosie the Robot” who worked as a household maid who refused to be taken for granted, “I may be made of metal, but I don’t have sawdust for brains!” Today’s robots have CPUs for brains and can do a lot more than sweep floors. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning are dramatically changing healthcare, and not a moment too soon.
“May you live to 100” is a blessing that is increasingly coming true for many. Within five years, the United Nations forecasts the U.S. will have a dependency ratio of 25%, that is, 25 people over 70 for every 100 between the ages of 24-69. Western Europe will nudge up to 35% within the same timeframe. China’s is expected to double from its current 20% by 2050. The world could be 10 million short of healthcare workers in five years.
Along with purported wisdom, ageing often brings chronic health problems. These are nuisances for individuals and families, and their treatment generates huge bills for governments and insurers. The second chronic issue is a massive shortage of healthcare workers. For example, there is an exponential demand for medical imaging, yet training for radiologists is not keeping up. All of this creates a massive total addressable market (TAM) with a big incentive for institutions to invest in healthcare AI and MedTech.
From Dr. Google to Dr. Robot: The Internet of Medical Things
Spot, a robot dog from Boston Dynamics, a world leader in hardware, is one of more than 1,500 quadruped machines employed by industrial institutions to patrol warehouses and office grounds, and perform other supervisory functions. (Some of them even roam the emerald lawns of Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, thus protecting a sentient animal from the trauma of having DJT as a dog parent.) Humanoid robots have also been busy autonomously cooking shrimp, folding clothes, cleaning stains, calling an elevator, and performing other domestic duties. These are the warm-up acts to do other things like diagnosing health problems and performing surgeries. Licensing AI medical doctors is not around the corner, but the technology is already integrated in many healthcare settings.
I-(Robot) Spy
Given the exponential demand for diagnostic imaging and the growing service gap, this area is at the forefront of a major disruption from AI systems which more consistently and accurately read X-ray, MRI and CAT scans than humans do in detecting lung nodules and lesions on mammograms. As data sets build out, at least 400 other health interpretations could be made. AI has also been shown to be more proficient than physicians in diagnosing rare diseases.
Another healthcare area of low-hanging fruit is ambient listening and documentation. Anyone who has visited a medical clinic is familiar with the time pressure nurses and physicians are under. They multi-task by actively listening and taking notes as you share your tale of woe. Eye contact is minimal or non-existent. Ambient listening, AI transcription and chart summarization tools analyze conversations in real-time while making clinical notes. AI tools can also quickly scan the patient’s entire medical history and gene sequence and provide a diagnosis in seconds, while also reducing the chance of misdiagnosis. This is no small thing, as each year over 800,000 people in the U.S. are misdiagnosed.
This technology saves personnel from potential burnout due to the additional administrative load, improves clinic efficiency and, in a perfect world, optimizes empathy and personalized care. When a patient feels rushed, or lacks an interpersonal connection with the healthcare provider, they are reluctant to share information that could affect their diagnosis and care.
For clinical staff, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is an AI framework that includes large language models (LLMs) that access organizational data to generate answers in a Q&A format. In a hospital setting, cameras and sensors combined with AI machine vision and ambient listening can help provide proactive patient care and manage workflow more efficiently. Currently, administrative tasks in the U.S. healthcare add 30% more to costs compared to other countries.
Haptic technology not only helps human patients who have lost hand sensitivity, it is also being tested in robot-assisted surgery. The trust factor is not here yet, however today’s humanoid robots have vision spatial intelligence, and embedded machine-learning software to adapt to different environments and navigate autonomously. Of course, it’s one thing to have a robot mop a factory floor and quite another to have it remove your gall bladder.
Investor, Heal Thyself
Expect big strides in this sector over the coming years. For investors, this presents an appealing opportunity to find tomorrow’s healthcare leaders and generate hearty future returns. While there is a slew of innovative AI healthcare companies, many are privately held. However, for retail investors there is no shortage of leading public companies, many in the U.S., at the forefront of health and technology, each hoping to carve out a slice of the $26 billion healthcare AI market. Let’s look at a few familiar names:
Johnson & Johnson
This U.S.-based consumer healthcare giant serves over 350 million patients globally. It has a strong platform in medical technology, including surgical and orthopedic robotics. It is also an M&A behemoth. Currently, J&J uses AI agents in the process of drug discovery, and it offers Ottava, a soft tissue robotic surgical system currently in clinical trials.
Microsoft
The brainiac behind Google’s DeepMind has joined Microsoft to head up the team focused on consumer health. According to a recent Deloitte survey, nearly 50% of those surveyed said they used chatbots like ChatGPT and Copilot to answer health-related queries. Microsoft hopes to capitalize on the demand for consumer health AI applications. Microsoft owns AI speech recognition Nuance with its DAX Copilot tool for physicians to auto-generate transcripts of patient visits and provide clinical summaries which reduces the time physicians spend on documentation by fifty percent. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is used by healthcare organizations to enable data integration and workflow.
Alphabet
Google Health (e.g. Dr. Google) uses its massive stores of data that it has amassed over many years, together with AI to diagnose diseases. The company has several healthcare divisions which focus on areas such as diagnostics, treatment options, and healthcare infrastructure. Alphabet’s DeepMind, AlphaFold, predicts protein structures to speed up drug discovery. Another subsidiary, Verily, focuses on personalized medical treatments based on a patient’s genetics and lifestyle.
Amazon
Amazon offers physicians AWS HealthScribe, an AI co-pilot that uses LLMs and speech recognition technology to generate transcripts and identify relevant medical details. It recently partnered with EvolutionaryScale in protein research to create proteins from scratch to aid functional understanding.
Medtronic PLC
The company has a strong Medtech pipeline in several key areas including spinal, pelvic health, heart, and diabetes. It has been active on the acquisition front with its recent purchase of spinal surgery company Medicrea, which uses AI and predictive modelling in spinal surgery. Medtronic currently uses AI to detect and treat a range of diseases including cancer and diabetes. Medtronic Hugo is the leader in robot-assisted surgery.
Intuitive Surgical
Considered the best-in-class for surgical robotics, the company’s Da Vinci robotics surgery system is growing in popularity among surgeons. In a recent survey by RBC Capital Markets, 92% indicated an interest in using it due to its accuracy and precision, next-gen 3D display, greater physician comfort, force sensing technology, and advanced computing and data-generating capabilities. Over 11 million surgeries have been performed globally using the technology.
Stryker Corp.
The company is a market leader in medical devices through its robotics platform. The Mako surgical robot assists in shoulder, knee, hip, and spinal surgeries. Stryker plans to compete with Intuitive Surgical in the soft tissue robotic surgery market which is booming. The company is active on the M&A front. Last year it bolstered its wireless medical device portfolio with the acquisition of care.ai which specializes in AI-assisted virtual care workflows, smart room technology and ambient solutions.
Rita Silvan, CIM is a finance journalist specializing in women and investing. She is the former editor-in-chief of ELLE Canada and Golden Girl Finance. Rita produces content for leading financial institutions and wealth advisors and has appeared on BNN Bloomberg, CBC Newsworld, and other media outlets. She can be reached at rita@ellesworth.ca.