(September 25, 2026) — On September 23 and 24, the National Consumers League (NCL) and the Milken Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH) at the George Washington University co-hosted “Future of Trust: Artificial Intelligence in Fraud & Healthcare,” a two-day conference exploring the opportunities and challenges posed by artificial intelligence. The conference’s second day focused on AI and healthcare, bringing together experts from government, academia, industry and patient and consumer organizations for discussions on innovation, access and consumer protections.
Following an introduction by Milken Institute SPH Dean Kelly Gebo, Vin Gupta, MD, a pulmonologist, senior medical analyst for MS NOW, and managing director of healthcare innovation at Manatt Health, delivered a keynote address, “Next Frontier of AI in Healthcare: From Breakthrough Innovation to Better Patient Care.”
In his remarks, Gupta argued that AI will play an increasingly important role in addressing challenges facing the U.S. healthcare system, including an aging population, workforce shortages, limited access to timely care and administrative inefficiencies.
Gupta highlighted emerging technologies that he believes could expand access to screening and monitoring, including wearable devices and contactless tools for measuring vital signs. He also discussed the growing use of AI in clinical settings, from ambient scribes that document patient visits to decision-support tools that help clinicians review health records and identify potential diagnoses. At the same time, Gupta acknowledged concerns surrounding greater reliance on AI in medicine. He pointed to questions about how medical education may need to change as AI tools become more common and whether future physicians could become overly dependent on technology for diagnostic reasoning.
Public trust, he said, will be critical to how these technologies are adopted. Gupta noted that patients and clinicians continue to value human involvement in medical decision-making and argued that the challenge is not simply whether healthcare should embrace or reject AI, but how to use the technology responsibly to address existing shortcomings in the healthcare system.
Gupta strongly believes the current healthcare system cannot meet our nation’s future needs. In the middle of his speech, he drove this message home by sharing a 2021 news clip of a military aircraft being repurposed as a mobile ICU for critically ill patients with COVID-19. He followed up the clip by saying, “This is not a sustainable model for dealing with an emergency.” He hopes AI is the answer to the never-ending challenges faced by healthcare providers and consumers everywhere.