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Health care is becoming increasingly consumer-driven. What does that shift mean for patients and the industry?
Consumers are taking far more control over their health, and we see it in the rise of consumer-initiated testing, connected devices and health apps. People now expect the same speed, simplicity and transparency from health care that they get everywhere else in their lives, and health care has been slow to meet that expectation.
The reality is that health care remains fragmented. Patients must stitch together information from multiple systems just to understand their own health, and as more of them order tests and interpret results, they need to be supported, not left on their own. The opportunity for our industry isn't simply to give consumers more data. It's giving them deeper, longitudinal insights across lab results, clinical history and genomics, so they can better understand their overall health and make more informed decisions.
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We have to move beyond delivering a result and help people take a proactive role in their care.
Consumers have access to more health information than ever before. How do we move from information to meaningful insights?
The challenge isn't a lack of information; it's connecting the dots and translating that information into something that improves care. A single result is a snapshot, but when you see how it changes over time, patterns emerge that would otherwise be missed. Connecting data across diagnostics, clinical records, genomics and closed claims is what turns raw information into real understanding.
At Labcorp, we're building that connected experience. Our MyLabcorp app brings lab results, health information and AI-enabled insights into one place, so people can track trends and have more informed conversations with their providers.
More than 4 million users downloaded the app in less than two months, underscoring that consumers are looking not just for data, but for actionable insights.
AI is one of the most talked-about technologies in health care. Where do you see the greatest opportunity for impact today?
We're already seeing AI accelerate drug discovery and development. There are drugs in clinical trials today that AI helped identify, and I expect that number to grow significantly in the coming years. We're also seeing advances in areas such as minimal residual disease (MRD) testing, where sophisticated analytics can help identify recurrence earlier and support more timely intervention.
The single greatest opportunity is helping physicians practice better medicine: guiding clinicians to the right test, synthesizing a patient's aggregated data into deeper insight and supporting the right treatment plan. That is where care becomes truly personalized. Our AI-powered Test Finder is a good example. It lets clinicians identify the right test using natural language, so providers spend less time searching catalogs and more time with patients.
Some people worry that AI could replace human decision-making in health care. What's the biggest misconception?
The biggest misconception is that AI is meant to replace human expertise. It isn't. Health care is about people, and technology works best when it supports the clinicians, scientists and researchers making critical decisions every day.
AI can review years of a patient's history, identify patterns and surface insights that would be difficult for any individual to recognize on their own. It can improve the accuracy of pathology interpretations and reduce administrative burdens. But the physician still owns the decision. Human judgment, accountability and oversight have to remain at the center, especially where a decision affects someone's life.
The goal isn't to replace people. It's to free them from the noise so they can do what they do best: care for patients.
How do you see diagnostics evolving over the next five years?
Diagnostics will become more predictive and help providers identify risk earlier, monitor disease progression and make more personalized decisions. Advances in AI and increasingly sophisticated models will drive progress in early detection, biomarker discovery and clinical decision support.
The most significant shift will be the move beyond individual biomarkers, or even panels of biomarkers, toward a more comprehensive view of health. By integrating diagnostic results with clinical history, genomics and other relevant health data, providers will gain a deeper understanding of each patient's unique health profile. As our ability to analyze large volumes of information continues to advance, physicians will be better equipped to develop personalized diagnostic and treatment strategies. Rather than simply delivering a result, diagnostics will provide the context and actionable insights needed to help guide care and improve outcomes.
Most people don't think about clinical trials in their daily lives. Why should they?
Clinical trials aren't just about developing future medicines. For many patients, they're a care option.
Nearly every medical breakthrough depends on clinical research to establish safety and effectiveness. Whether someone is managing a chronic condition or facing a serious diagnosis, the trials running today shape the options available to them tomorrow and they continually expand our collective scientific understanding.
How is technology helping accelerate the journey from clinical research to real-world patient care?
AI and advanced analytics help researchers connect diagnostic and clinical data to identify the right patient populations, improve trial design and streamline slow, manual processes. By connecting outcomes data, including closed claims, with biomarker and clinical data, drug developers can make smarter recruitment decisions and design better protocols. Together, this accelerates development and lowers the cost of bringing a therapy to market.
We're putting this into practice. Through our work with AWS and Datavant, we're applying AI to large-scale real-world data to turn months of preparation and analysis into minutes. We’re also advancing solutions like Global Trial Connect to digitize investigator workflows end to end.
But technology alone isn't enough. To deliver meaningful impact, AI must be embedded into everyday workflows rather than treated as a standalone tool. The organizations that succeed will operationalize AI at scale, not just experiment with it.
As health care becomes more digital, how do you build and maintain trust?
Trust requires far more than protecting patient data. It means building security, transparency and accountability into how AI is developed and deployed from the start, with clear governance standards, appropriate human oversight and continuous monitoring so systems stay reliable and secure. Where a decision can affect someone's life, responsible innovation has to matter as much as the innovation itself.
Trust also has to be visible. Patients and physicians need to understand where the data behind a recommendation came from and why that recommendation was made.
If you look ahead ten years, what do you hope the health care experience feels like for the average person?
I'd like the system to be more intelligent, connected, personalized and predictive. Imagine this: based on your health data and longitudinal history, the system identifies potential concerns and gives your physician a more informed starting point for evaluation, reducing guesswork and unnecessary testing. Your connected devices detect a potential issue, notify you and your physician and care begins earlier, often before you'd feel a symptom. Navigating the health care system becomes far less cumbersome.
My hope is that health care becomes truly proactive and personal, with patients having a clearer understanding of their health, actionable insights available when they need them and technology helping providers intervene earlier. The best future isn't one where technology replaces human interaction. It's one where technology works quietly in the background, reducing complexity so patients and providers can focus on what matters most: better health outcomes.
This article has been paid for by a third party. The views and opinions expressed are not those of Newsweek and are not an endorsement of the products, services or persons mentioned.
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