Note from the Road: The UAE and the Future Business Model of Healthcare
I just returned from an energizing visit to the UAE with Dave Westenberg at Piper Sandler — thank you to Dave and the team for the invitation to join the tour, and for the opportunity to lead Monday night's dinner discussion on a topic I care deeply about: why the precision medicine revolution will be driven as much by tools and diagnostics as by therapeutics.
I left the UAE with a strong sense that the region is not just trying to modernize healthcare, but trying to reimagine the healthcare business model. And that distinction matters.
In most mature healthcare systems, we are still largely operating inside a "sick-care" paradigm: wait for disease, diagnose late, treat aggressively, reimburse episodically, and then wonder why costs keep compounding. Precision medicine has always promised a different model — earlier detection, better risk stratification, more targeted intervention, longitudinal monitoring, and a shift from reactive treatment to proactive health management.
The UAE offers a glimpse of what that model could look like when the incentives are more aligned.
- Population-wide whole-genome sequencing
- Integrated delivery
- Public-private coordination
- A national ambition to build around prevention, not just treatment
The work being led by Paul Jones at M42, and by other local leaders across the ecosystem, was genuinely inspiring.
Many of the most valuable conversations on the trip were with investors and other stakeholders who were excited about the region's potential, but also clear-eyed about what still needs to happen: deeper infrastructure, scalable policy frameworks, specialized talent, stronger translational capabilities, and more companies physically building on the ground.
That last point came up repeatedly. It is one thing to attract talent. It is another to build an ecosystem. A true innovation ecosystem needs critical mass. It needs founders, operators, investors, clinicians, data scientists, regulators, payers, and strategics interacting repeatedly in the same physical and institutional environment. It needs companies that do not just visit, but stay. It needs enough density that ideas can move from dinner conversations to pilots, from pilots to companies, and from companies to durable platforms.
That is where the UAE opportunity becomes especially interesting. The region has capital. It has ambition. It has the ability to coordinate across public and private priorities in ways that many Western healthcare systems struggle to do. And it has a genuine opening to build a healthcare model around the technologies that I believe will define the next era of medicine: genomics, diagnostics, data infrastructure, AI, and longitudinal patient monitoring.
The strategic question is whether this becomes a showcase market — a place where world-class technologies are deployed — or a true innovation hub, where new companies and platforms are built, scaled, and exported. My hope is the latter. Because if precision medicine is going to fulfill its promise, we need more places willing to redesign the system around it.
And on a more personal note: I also left deeply impressed, and frankly a bit awestruck, by the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque. Both are extraordinary reminders that vision, when matched with capital, patience, and execution, can create something globally distinctive.
That may be the real lesson from the trip. Healthcare transformation will not happen through technology alone. It will require vision, infrastructure, coordination, trust, and the willingness to build for decades. The UAE appears serious about that challenge.
I'm looking forward to being back — both to see the progress in healthcare and, admittedly, to keep exploring the attractions I didn't get to this time.