They say the only two certainties in life are death and taxes, but you could also make an argument for adding rising healthcare costs to the list.

“There is no end in sight to the amount of healthcare spending because it scales with multiple on the population,” Josh Makower, MD, general partner venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (one of the top 10 medtech VC firms), told an audience at the Medtech Conference in San Jose yesterday.

Speaking on a panel about the future of healthcare delivery at the event hosted by medtech industry trade group AdvaMed, Makower went on to assert that medical devices and pharmaceuticals account for a relatively small piece of the healthcare spending pie. In reality, a larger share of our healthcare costs goes toward paying the salaries of the people working in healthcare.

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The real value of AI, added Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak, who also spoke on the panel, is in making more efficient use of the human resources in healthcare. “They should be supplemented with real, grounded database knowledge that helps make better decisions and provide better care,” he said.

Like Makower, Ishrak shared his vision of how the future of AI in healthcare might play out. He described three ways in which he believes the technology will be used… Continue reading.