At the Civic Health Forum, Dr. Daniel Kraft – founder of NextMed Health, Digital.Health, and Continuum Health Ventures – made the case that healthcare's future is arriving faster than institutions can absorb it.

About 60% of Americans now consult AI before seeing a doctor, and 14 million have skipped a provider visit entirely after using it, a trend Kraft framed as innovation moving at the speed of desperation rather than the speed of trust. He walked through the convergence reshaping care: wearables and "otherables" that can already predict pregnancy, COVID, and diabetes days or years before diagnosis, smartphone cameras and voice as diagnostic tools, ambient AI co-pilots already piloted at Cedars-Sinai, and the emergence of a personal "digitome," a continuous data profile that functions like a check engine light for individual health. Dr. Kraft was clear that none of this replaces the human element of care, but argued that blending human wisdom with AI, not choosing between them, is what will finally shift medicine from reactive sick care to proactive health creation. He pointed to Digital.Health, a free platform cataloging more than 6,000 digital health solutions, as one way to help the field make sense of the pace of change.

His challenge to the room: don't just predict the future of civic health, build it boldly, together.