GenAI plus GLP-1s will be healthcare’s next great disease-fighting duo.
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Healthcare costs have become a growing problem for American families.
Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults worry about being able to afford medical care and coverage. Less than half are “cost secure,” which Gallup defines as having access to quality, affordable care and recently being able to pay for both needed care and medicine.
Meanwhile, national health spending has risen more than 7% for each of the last three years, surpassing $5.7 trillion in 2025 and predicted to rise to $9 trillion by 2034.
Yet efforts by insurers and employers to restrain those costs still rely on the same ineffective tools deployed for decades: cutting benefits, restricting access, requiring prior authorization and shifting more of the bill to patients.
In the healthcare strategy course I teach at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and in my role on the School of Medicine faculty, I advise students who want to improve medicine to follow Sutton’s Law and go where the money is: chronic disease.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that chronic diseases account for most illnesses, disabilities and deaths in the United States and are the leading drivers of the nation’s healthcare costs. Published estimates associate five major chronic conditions — obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and dementia — with more than $1.3 trillion in annual healthcare expenses.
Five years ago, medicine lacked the tools to address these problems. Today, the combination of GLP-1 medicines and generative artificial intelligence provides a path to affordability. Like superheroes joining forces, these innovations attack the evils of chronic disease from all sides: preventing them from developing and controlling them before they produce costly, life-threatening complications like heart attacks, strokes and kidney failures.
Preventing More Chronic Disease
Obesity affects more than 100 million American adults and increases the risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, 13 types of cancer, sleep apnea and liver disease. It is associated with an estimated $260.6 billion in annual medical spending.
After rising for two decades, the U.S. adult obesity rate declined over the past four years from 39.9% to 36.4% as GLP-1 usage increased nearly 600%. Although population data do not establish causation, the largest obesity declines occurred in age groups with the highest GLP-1 use.
Clinical trials provide strong evidence for the efficacy of drugs like Zepbound. Adults with obesity but without diabetes lost an average 20% of their weight on tirzepatide over 72 weeks. Other trials found that tirzepatide sharply reduced progression from prediabetes to diabetes and reduced worsening heart-failure events. And with oral GLP-1 medications now available, treatment is becoming easier for patients who are reluctant to use injections.
But even widespread GLP-1 use won’t prevent every case of hypertension, diabetes or heart failure. Millions of Americans will continue living with chronic conditions that require daily management.
Controlling The Diseases That Remain
Doctors and patients struggle to control chronic disease, even when effective medications and clear treatment guidelines exist. That’s largely because U.S. medicine still relies on brief visits every three or four months rather than continuous care.
Consider hypertension. The disease affects 48% of American adults, yet fewer than one-quarter have their blood pressure under control. In 2024, high blood pressure was a primary or contributing cause of 680,179 deaths and associated with approximately $220 billion in annual costs.
The problem: A physician may prescribe the right medication in January but not discover for months that the dose was too low, the patient stopped taking it or a second drug was needed.
Similarly, inadequately controlled diabetes results in approximately 44% of new cases of end-stage kidney disease that require dialysis or transplantation and accounts for over 5% of Medicare’s total budget.
Today, physicians lack the time to review a torrent of blood-pressure, glucose, weight and other readings from every patient with chronic disease. But GenAI, connected to home monitoring devices, could analyze those measurements, identify when treatment is failing, and alert the individuals and their clinicians when medications need adjustment.
Already, GenAI is matching or exceeding clinician expertise. In a Cedars-Sinai study of 461 virtual urgent-care visits, an independent panel of physicians rated 77% of AI-generated recommendations as optimal, compared with 67% of doctors’ decisions. In a separate randomized trial, GPT-4 scored 16 percentage points higher on diagnostic reasoning than physicians using conventional resources.
Neither study suggests that AI should replace doctors. But with 400,000 Americans dying annually from misdiagnoses, 250,000 from preventable medical errors and as many as a half a million from the complications of poorly controlled chronic disease, our nation cannot afford to ignore opportunities to to improve accuracy, continuity and disease control with GenAI.
Turning Innovation Into Affordability
GLP-1s and GenAI attack both ends of the nation’s chronic disease crisis. The first reduces obesity and the risks of diabetes, along with cardiovascular disease, cancers and other obesity-related complications. The other, generative AI, could help clinicians control chronic conditions before they lead to life-threatening complications, which require costly medications and result in hospitalizations.
The government has the opportunity to dramatically lower healthcare costs by making access to GLP-1 medications and GenAI easier for all Americans who would benefit.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has already demonstrated one path to affordability. Its Medicare GLP-1 Bridge gives eligible beneficiaries access to certain weight-management medicines for a $50 monthly copayment. Congress, private insurers and self-funded employers should build on that model by negotiating the same low prices in exchange for expanding coverage for all Americans who meet evidence-based clinical criteria.
Governmental agencies under the Department of Health and Human Services would ensure that all home and wearable monitors could connect through Bluetooth to clinician-supervised AI systems and provide educational tools for patients on how to effectively use them. Furthermore, they could work with private companies to rapidly build and test these large language models for reliability and reimburse physicians and pharmacists when they made medication modifications.
With employer healthcare costs projected rise 9.5% next year, and many companies considering cutting back healthcare coverage, the time has come for the government to move quickly. GLP-1 medications for prevention and GenAI for chronic-disease control offer a better path to affordability: lower costs for all Americans by improving health rather than restricting and rationing care.