Sorry to burst your hype bubble but next-gen diagnostics powered by AI are here — beyond call center, beyond revenue cycle optimization. Real clinical wins.
I know what you’re thinking: You can’t slap A-I on something and call it done. It’s all still just hype, right . . . right?
Hype is the name we give to something that overpromises and underdelivers. That simply doesn’t apply to the healthcare innovations that Sage spotlighted at CES 2026 during our panel Next-Gen Diagnostics: A New Era of Early Detection.
Once upon a time, healthcare sat on the sidelines of the Consumer Electronics Show. No longer. Showroom buzz over cold brew contraptions and laundry-folding robots comingled with excitement about diagnostic tools that can detect down to the weight of one cell of hummingbird DNA.
Hummingbird.
I can’t remember the last time I came back from a conference THIS excited. Why?
Because it’s time.
It’s time to talk about AI-driven clinical innovations that are real, here, now.
It’s time to be bullish about it.
It’s time — paraphrasing Silicon Valley — to move fast and fix things.
Here are four real-market examples from CES that have the power to change the fundamentals of care and finance. But only if healthcare’s outdated approaches get out of the way.
Time to diagnose brain injuries in new ways
Sage’s CES panel targeted cutting-edge tools that make diagnosis faster, more accessible, and more personal.
Beth McQuiston MD, (Medical Director, Abbott Diagnostics) described a handheld device that uses just a few drops of blood to diagnose hard-to-find brain injuries in just 15 minutes by measuring brain proteins down to the picogram.
A picogram is the weight of DNA in one hummingbird cell.
Diagnostic nirvana with just a few drops of blood. But this ain’t Theranos. Abbott’s device was co-created with the Department of Defense by hundreds of scientists and is FDA cleared.
Compare this to the old diagnostic model (a/k/a the current one): a combination of limited technologies and assessments, broad diagnostic labels, and clinical encounters that asked people with amnesia to remember the last thing they forgot.
Time to move fast and fix things. Here’s another example from CES. . .
Time to leap from precision diagnostics to precision medicine
A diagnostic from Avalon Healthcare Solutions also uses just a few drops of blood — this time to both target the mutations that lead to non-small cell lung cancer and pinpoint its diagnosis and treatment.
This approach compresses the care cycle, allowing Avalon — in the words of founder Bill Kerr — to “scale diagnostic information from just a few drops of blood.”
It could do that except . . .
“A third of patients never get tested for those mutations, mostly due to logistical challenges [e.g., multi-provider communication, traditional treatment biases].”
“New diagnostics take 17-20 years to get deployed evenly in healthcare,” Kerr added. “And that’s just too long.”
Surely we can move faster to fix things.
Time to empower the consumer
“We proved that digital health works.”
This from Carlos Nunez MD, CMO ResMed, and another CES panelist. ResMed’s medical devices help treat sleep and breathing-related disorders like sleep apnea and COPD.
“We now have approximately 30 million cloud-connected devices that have sent over 20 billion days and nights of sleep and respiratory data,” Nunez shared.
“If you take data off that device and you show it to the provider, the adherence would jump from 50% to over 70% and then if you show that data to a person on an app so they can see how they’re doing, adherence jumps to 87%.”
“Diagnostics and sensing have gotten so good,” Nunez added. “We’ve surrounded ourselves, on purpose, with incredibly capable sensors that can measure things in picrogram quantities. When you get that into the home and you can simplify it so that the average consumer can use a medical-grade device to better manage their health and wellness, how great will we be?”
Time to find out.
Time to make life-saving tech affordable
AliveCor has created mobile EKGs that fit in a physician’s pocket with enough power to detect not only afib but 35 different cardiac determinations, rapidly and with high quality.
“It feels like we’ve reduced it to a math problem,” says Priya Abani, CEO of AliveCor. “The number of electrodes and determinations, with each one of those things saving potentially millions of lives.”
The goal is more devices that fit in the patient’s pocket — that are accessible, affordable and can be used at home. One AliveCor device costs just $69.
“When you’re sitting on life-saving tech, you want to make sure that anyone who needs it can afford it.”
Life-saving innovation over institutional doubt
Sitting on life-saving tech is no longer an option.
Traumatic Brain Injury and cancer detection from just a whisper of blood. Mini EKGs. Mountains of sleep and respiratory data that dramatically improve adherence. These clinical wins are real, here, now. They prove that we can move fast and fix things.
“The technology is already here,” Nunez told Sage. “Healthcare has an important set of decisions to make. Inflection points are happening right now. We can’t afford to slow down, and we don’t have time to think about it.”
“We need to get over ourselves a little bit,” he added.
Nunez is right, because healthcare’s patchwork doesn’t work.
“Yeah, but our consumers are patients.”
“Yeah, but we have to get things right.”
“Yeah, but we still have to figure out how to cover, price and pay for it.”
Healthcare is at risk of “Yeah, but”-ing itself from the business of saving more lives.
Calling Hype! is how we grapple with what we don’t understand. It’s how we navigate the new, how we vet it, how we navigate uncertainty in public. But maybe we’ve held on to our hype shields a little too long.
Artificial intelligence is not hype. It is a mature science, aided by 5G, cloud computing, and the rapid storage and processing of massive amounts of data. Advances in computational power and large language models now make it possible to combine results from blood tests, biometrics such as heart rate and blood pressure, and medical imaging.
Companies like Abbott and AliveCor, Avalon and ResMed innovate continuously because that’s what innovation requires. Heck, even the government is starting to open the regulatory floodgates and say Have at it!
Long before AI, healthcare had its own slop: workflow slop, operations slop, payment model slop, staffing slop. It still does.
Let’s figure it out.
Let’s move faster and fix things.
