We started the year off with a powerful gathering of health tech founders over dinner in our San Francisco office. With many in town for the JP Morgan Health Conference, we were able to bring together founders from companies such as Bodyport, Mindstate Design Labs, Bristle, Simple HealthKit, and others. 

As a healthcare investor who has worked closely with many of these companies, it was incredible to witness the moments of connection among our healthcare founders. 

One of the most surprising things I learned throughout the evening was the relevance of lessons learned from founders who are farther along in their journey for the earlier founders. Also, what a small world it is as founders were able to make valuable connections with each other. For example, one founder was trying to get an introduction to a strategic who was on another founder’s board.

After the event, I was inspired to continue the conversation, so I reached out to all the attendees to ask them about the trends in health or software they are most excited about in 2024.

For some, regulatory developments could be a key unlock – with FDA approval pending for psychedelic mental health therapies or Medicare regulations promoting value-based care. Other founders are anticipating increased awareness and funding for areas traditionally overlooked, such as women’s health and functional dentistry. Additionally, the vast potential of generative AI in life sciences, biology, and clinical decision-making was acknowledged.

Here are the other healthcare predictions from our founders:

Thaddeus Fulford-Jones, Radial Analytics CEO

  • Medicare’s risk adjustment changes for 2024 will make it harder for Medicare Advantage plans to remain financially viable. These plans will need to reassess their existing clinical-business operations, especially in light of significant pushback from providers and widespread media coverage in 2023 spotlighting plans enforcing prior authorization decisions to favor economics over quality of care. We expect to see Medicare Advantage plans expanding their use of value based contracting and focusing on how payers and providers can work more closely together on care management and population health.

Dillan DiNardo, Mindstate Design Labs CEO

  • In 2024, mental health conditions will remain a significant focus as we continue to face the underlying drivers of the mental health crisis. Creative new solutions will emerge, such as the likely first FDA approval of a psychedelic therapy with MDMA as well as a host of new AI-powered tools for diagnosing and treating disease. As AI tools provide a greater ability to understand the human brain, we may even see neuroscience begin to inspire new AI approaches or architectures.

Halle Tecco, Cofertility cofounder

  • I think it’s going to be a great year for women’s health. Women’s health founders, usually women, are used to doing more with less. And now we have several successful women’s health as beacons – Maven, KindBody, Tia, Progyny, Midi, etc.  From our vantage point, we also know fertility care will become more accessible, because truly there’s no other direction to go. With better tools, clinics will become more efficient and able to serve more patients. And with better options for egg freezing, like through Cofertility, more women can freeze their eggs affordably.

Dereck Paul, Glass Health CEO

  • Recent studies have shown that foundational LLMs possess remarkable baseline diagnostic and clinical reasoning capabilities. LLMs like ChatGPT and MedPaLM pass physician licensing exams, and some diagnose cases with accuracy levels comparable to experienced clinicians. Equipping physicians with LLM-based applications that are specifically crafted and fine-tuned to enhance their diagnostic and clinical reasoning abilities will lead to a major improvement in their capacity to deliver excellent patient care. We can anticipate more studies showing a significant positive upside of equipping physicians with AI CDS, both in terms of improved patient outcomes and cost savings. This will create an imperative for adoption at the provider and health system level. In 2024, I predict that we will see significant growth in the adoption of AI for clinical decision support by providers and health systems. Companies that harness the power of large language models to assist clinicians with diagnosis and treatment planning are poised to improve diagnostic accuracy, enhance the implementation of evidence-based care, accelerate the achievement of health equity, and improve patient outcomes worldwide.

Aaron Mayer, Enable Medicine cofounder

  • Multimodal foundation models will continue to grow in the space, allowing for new types of questions to be asked and answered. For example, image to text models will allow pathologists to talk to an image of a tumor slide to extract insights like diagnosis, molecular biomarkers, cancer mutation status and more. 
  • Personalized biomarkers will continue to be identified and utilized to improve trial design and proper drug/patient matching. They will increasingly leverage multimodal data and AI models that can distill the complexity of large biological datasets to outputs which are interpretable and clinically useful.
  • Applications of Generative AI in Chemistry, Biology, Life Sciences, and Medicine will continue to emerge. This was one of the hottest topics at JPM this year. These models will become the interface for interacting with large chemical and biological datasets in drug design and development and allow institutions/companies to better leverage their data to answer important questions.
  • The amount and complexity of biological data collected on patients will continue to grow. Organizations will require data strategies and infrastructure to index, operate on, and search this data for meaningful insights. Data security and privacy will remain important topics of debate.

Danny Grannick, Bristle Health CEO

  • We see the rise of functional dentistry.  Similar to functional medicine, which focuses on root cause, prevention and holistic care, functional dentisty is a departure from traditional, reactive care.  Existing tools like X-rays and observational screenings only detect the symptoms of disease. By then, they’ve become serious issues requiring invasive, painful and expensive procedures. But the future is different. Functional dentistry looks dramatically different:
  • Emerging tools like oral microbiome testing provide early detection & root-cause insights into disease. These tools are non-invasive, low-cost & more effective than your standard checkup. Also, research is showing connections between the bacteria in our mouths & systemic conditions including diabetes, heart disease and Alzheimer’s . Expect your dentist to ask about your medical history & diet along with how much you brush & floss. 
  • Dentists will use these biological data points to make informed treatment decisions. Functional care is personalized, preventive and precise instead of one-size-fits-all.