Axios Event: Top 5 takeaways from Axios' inaugural Future of Health Summit

Axios held its inaugural Future of Health Summit on May 14 in Washington, D.C., featuring an afternoon of conversations with leaders at the forefront of health care policy, technology and scientific research.

• The event was sponsored by Adtalem, Danone and UnitedHealth Group.

Catch up quick: Here are our top 5 takeaways from the afternoon …

1. Award-winning journalist Katie Couric, a longtime advocate for preventative cancer screenings, shared some alarming statistics about the rise in cancer diagnoses among young people.

• Young people today are twice as likely to be diagnosed with colon cancer and four times as likely to be diagnosed with rectal cancer than people who were born in 1950, she said.
• Couric called the Trump administration's cuts to scientific research at the NIH "chilling." "From 2010 to 2019, 254 of the 256 new therapeutics approved by the FDA were all the result of at least partial research by the NIH. … I think that encapsulates how devastating these cuts are."

2. Senior White House adviser Calley Means said that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a "spiritual mandate" to reform the U.S. health care system.

• He also said the American people have a "crisis of trust" in health care institutions.

3. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) said she finds it "deeply troubling" the Senate confirmed Kennedy as health secretary, calling him "a vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist."

• "He has spent a career creating conspiracy theories around this."

4. Oscar Health CEO Mark Bertolini described his take on how to get through to the Trump administration.

• "You don't use certain words – like DEI, bad word. … I sit on the Verizon board, I chair their finance committee, our DEI effort is alive and well, it's just not called that anymore."

5. Zocdoc CEO Oliver Kharraz said that "superhuman" augmentative AI could transform medicine.

• "There's a really amazing journey of productivity ahead of us."

Go deeper: More top moments from the event.

Content from the sponsored segments:

In View From the Top conversations, Steve Beard, Adtalem Global Education's chairman and CEO, and Wyatt Decker, UnitedHealth Group executive vice president and chief physician of value-based care, both said AI could have transformative effects for health care workers.

• Beard said that while he doesn't think AI will become a substitute for clinicians, it could help address staffing shortages.

• "I do think it's an opportunity to really extend the impact of clinicians in an exponential way, particularly at points of scarcity," he said. "It's a fantastic leverage point that I think will go a long way toward broadening the reach of health care and making individual human clinicians that much more effective."
• Decker cited an example of ambient voice recognition that has already been deployed in clinics and can shorten a family doctor's day by 90 minutes. "For doctors and nurses, let's actually address their burnout with administrative burden. … That technology is here today."

Separately, Danone group deputy CEO Shane Grant said nutrition for health is "on the rise in America."

• "What I mean by that is when we look at the data, the prominence of health and nutrition and its importance to Americans is on the rise across all demographics," Grant said. "For example, [we see that] Americans consider food and health through food to be more important to their health than sleep and exercise."