The 7 next big things in health and medicine for 2026

As these honorees show, the future of medicine is looking more and more . . . futuristic. They include AI that diagnoses more than a dozen serious conditions from a single abdominal scan, a sci-fi-worthy clinic that reimagines the preventive care model, and a psychedelic that tackles treatment-resistant depression with a synthetic version of a Sonoran Desert toad secretion. Need help with paying rising out-of-pocket medical costs? There’s even a solution for that. AidocFor massively streamlining the interpretation of medical imaging Roughly one in four adults will need medical imaging this year, creating a daunting caseload for radiologists who interpret the scans. AI can help, but most tools assess single conditions, resulting in diagnostic blind spots and critical care delays. Aidoc’s operating system for clinical radiology, called aiOS, consolidates these separate workflows. In January 2026, the FDA cleared Aidoc’s comprehensive abdomen CT triage tool, which can diagnose 15 acute conditions—including appendicitis, aortic dissection, and bowel obstruction—from a single scan. With a total of 30-plus FDA-cleared algorithms to date—spanning cardiology, oncology, and vascular condit…