Healthcare leaders share their biggest takeaways from CES 2024

Though the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is typically known as the place where big tech companies like Microsoft and Apple show off their latest innovations, digital health is becoming an increasingly important part of the annual conference.

Leaders from across the healthcare industry—including Elevance Health CEO Gail Boudreaux and FDA Commissioner Robert Califf—met at the 2024 CES conference to discuss the latest trends in health technology and check out the tech in action. With the conference now in the rearview mirror, Healthcare Brew asked attendees for their biggest takeaways.

Drew Schiller, CEO at digital health company Validic and executive board member of the Consumer Technology Association, which hosts CES, told Healthcare Brew one of his main takeaways was a change in attendee demographics.

In past years, many CES digital health attendees worked in tech innovation roles, Schiller said. But this year, he mainly saw healthcare operators and physicians, who he called the “people who are in the trenches doing the real work.”

Ami Bhatt, a cardiologist and chief innovation officer at the American College of Cardiology, told Healthcare Brew that one of her takeaways was the importance of using digital health to bring high-quality healthcare into the communities where patients live.

“We want to have health and wellness happen in the home, in the community,” Bhatt said. “We want people to feel that they have agency over their own health.”

Of course, another big takeaway from the conference involved the immense amount of health tech on display. Schiller said EssilorLuxottica’s glasses with built-in hearing aids—made possible by 2022 legislation legalizing over-the-counter hearing aids—stood out to him as particularly interesting.

But it can be hard to discern which tech products have the potential to affect real change in the healthcare industry and which are just shiny objects. Bhatt said to differentiate between the two, she first looks at a product’s focus.

“Health tech should be really good at one thing that’s not done well right now, or that’s not done at all,” she said. “There’s too many health problems, so we need to take the things that exist and make them better, but more importantly we need to find the blank spaces where we don’t have a solution for this pain point.”

Sara Vaezy, EVP and chief strategy and digital officer at national Catholic health system Providence, said one of the main things she looks for is ease of use. Health tech developers need to make products easy enough that a patient would be willing to use it even when sick, Vaezy said.

“It’s not just about the ability to do a task—it’s the experience,” she said.

One of the benefits of CES is bringing together the people developing health tech and the clinicians who may someday use it, Bhatt said. Once a digital health company creates a useful product and a strong go-to-market strategy, it’s then a clinician’s turn to figure out how to integrate it into their workflows, she added.

“It is our responsibility to say, ‘Thank you for the engineering, thank you for bringing the technology together, thank you for figuring out your business plan. Now we need to actually get it into the workflow of care delivery,’” Bhatt said. “We need clinicians and others who are providing care to understand how to use it, we need patients to understand how to use it, and we need to ensure that there’s an infrastructure that allows for it to be used, iterated upon, and improved.”