Within Reach: 2026’s Breakthrough Ideas in Health

Today, no technology is moving faster or unlocking more possibilities than AI. We’re seeing healthcare startups scale at unprecedented speed with smaller teams, overturning long-held assumptions about what it takes to build enduring companies.

Our excitement around technology isn’t focused solely on productivity or efficiency, however. It’s rooted in the opportunity to materially improve how people learn, work, and care for one another. AI is expanding who technology can serve, opening doors to people, professions, and markets that have long been considered too small, too fragmented, or too “unscalable” to matter.

As we head into the new year, we will explore the breakthrough ideas that will define 2026. In Part 1, our healthcare investors share how we will redesign holistic care for longer lives, welcome a trusted AI doctor, and shift the healthcare system to a more predictive, proactive model of care.

1. The New Operating System for Longevity Care

Jomayra Herrera, Partner

I’m excited about the emergence of a true operating system — and next-generation EHR — for longevity care.

As consumers increasingly seek integrated solutions that address physical, mental, emotional, and social well-being, the gap between what people need and what today’s healthcare systems are designed to deliver keeps widening. Longevity care, in particular, is still stitched together across supplements, biomarker tests, lifestyle interventions, and specialty consults. These pieces rarely speak to each other or fit naturally into today’s EHRs.

The opportunity isn’t just another workflow tool. It’s to replace the EHR entirely with systems that integrate continuous data, surface personalized insights, and guide clinicians toward the most effective interventions. These platforms may first find traction in cash-pay practices, where clinicians have more flexibility to adopt innovative models. But over time, as they generate evidence to show that holistic, proactive longevity care drives down costs and improves outcomes, they can move into the mainstream and reshape reimbursement itself.

Early products like Vibrant and Blue hint at what’s possible. Let’s build the infrastructure that makes whole-person, predictive, longevity-focused care scalable and part of everyday care.

2. Meet Dr. AI: Your First Stop to Quality, Scalable Care

Caoimhe MacRunnels, Principal

In 2026, patients will see their first AI doctor. This time it won’t be an experiment or a sci-fi movie, but instead a new standard point of care.

Healthcare has reached a breaking point: costs and waitlists are rising, while access keeps shrinking and trust in large institutions is deteriorating. Yet one trust anchor remains surprisingly solid: your doctor. Personal physicians are more than twice as influential on health decisions than global health authorities.

The problem is that far too few people have regular access to a primary care provider. It has turned into a mix of documentation drowning and referral management. Doctors are overextended. Patients feel unseen. So it’s no surprise that 92% of consumers say the healthcare experience itself must improve.

Dr. AI will chip away at this. In 2026, AI systems will handle the repetitive but essential front line of care: symptom intake, vitals collection, documentation, routine lab ordering, lifestyle guidance, and triage. The AI doctor becomes the always available first stop on a patient’s health journey.

This will not eliminate human clinicians, who remain as central and essential as ever. Instead, it will extend their reach and allow them to focus on what is uniquely human. They will concentrate on complex diagnostics, contextual judgment, ethical oversight, and the kind of relational communication that builds trust. In a world where we dump our health data into ChatGPT and anxiously self-diagnose, empathetic interpretation becomes a scarce resource. The big outcome is white glove care at a mass market price. 

3. Shifting From Reactive to Predictive Care

Shauntel Garvey, General Partner

In 2026, our healthcare system will continue the shift from reactive care to predictive care thanks to advances in AI.

Most people only interact with the healthcare system when something is wrong, and often when it is too late to intervene. With the widespread adoption of wearables and biosensors (1 in 3 Americans use a wearable device), we can now analyze a patient’s biometrics in real time and predict medical events before they happen. Imagine a world where autonomous agents continuously analyze this data and proactively surface insights and opportunities to manage conditions. For example, an AI agent could identify a potential heart failure or diabetic crash from wearable data, and then seamlessly schedule the appropriate doctor appointment, recommend medication adjustments, and coordinate a pharmacy delivery.  

A shift toward predictive care is also aligned with the healthcare industry’s move toward Value-based Care (VBC), which prioritizes outcomes over the quantity of tests and visits. Solutions that help providers and care teams intervene early will thus be VBC enablers, a market that is projected to reach $10.2 billion by 2031. 

Predictive care is a win-win-win-win for patients, providers, and payers, with more personalized treatment, better patient outcomes, improved efficiency and lower costs. Making it a reality in 2026 and beyond will require stronger data interoperability, greater transparency, and deeper collaboration across the entire healthcare ecosystem.