Onsite at WIRM Congress 2026: Healthcare Transformation AI & Regenerative

Everyone sees the brand, but nobody sees the build. I'm Cindy and I'm Justin and this is a Matrix method. Your inside look at what it really takes to scale an aesthetic beauty brand. From the names that you know to the ones you need to, let's get into it. Hi everyone. I am on site here in San Francisco at the World Institute, a regenerative medicine congress, 2026. I am here with Dr. Allen Young. He owns every young consulting. He is one of our consultants here at Matrix Collective. He is a keynote speaker in the AI and regenerative space. So I'm really excited to have him on the show today to talk to you about what the future of regenerative care looks like and also the impact of AI in this space because those are two very hot topics in our world right now. So Dr. Allen Young, thank you for joining us and well joining me, Justin is not here. But if you could kind of give us a brief overview of what you spoke about today, what you're seeing in the future of regenerative care and the role it has. And some of the learnings we see in hospitals and how that's going to transition into the private sector. And thank you Cindy for having me. It's great to be here in San Francisco, beautiful Fairemont for the world congress of the World Institute of Regenerative Medicine. Their first inaugural conference hope to be back next year. And it's interesting. The morning sessions kicked off with the current state of the industry, regenerative medicine. And every speaker mentioned the word artificial intelligence. And so when it came time for me to speak about the future innovation within the industry, my topic was the convergence of AI and regenerative medicine. And so I took a step back and said AI has been in development for many years. Regenerative medicine is obviously as a field been around for a long time. And in parallel, there's other things going on as well, such as precision medicine, which relies heavily on genomics and personalization. And the focus of my conversation was really the convergence of all three of these as we're coming together. Almost for the first time. And it's actually happening now. We're seeing the use of AI in multiple areas that are impacting the way clinicians are doing one of many things. One could be leading discovery towards investigational new drugs. So the current models in life sciences are enabling faster discovery, increased fidelity around identifying the right targets. Also predictive analytics around what is not working and where you can see downfalls or delays in the typical drug development process. All of that is resulted in the ability for organizations to capture more data around patients, genomic data, proteomic data, epigenetic data, everything that's related to the way patients will respond to treatment, whether or not personalization or precision medicine will be a factor in the care that they receive. I think artificial intelligence is going to continue to impact how physicians care and how they determine the best course of treatment for patients, be it in traditional medicine or cutting edge fields such as regenerative medicine. One example is the recent study by the American Medical Association looked at the explosive use of AI by your everyday physician. Back in 2023, the number hovered around 38% of physicians admitted to using artificial intelligence in their daily practice. Last year, the survey results from the AMA have shot up to 81%. So doubling the number of physicians, 4 out of 5 clinicians admit that they're using AI. Now that would be remarkable because at different forms of AI are out there, including ambient scribing that helps physicians reduce administrative time. And another one that helps with decision making out the bedside is the use of analytical tools such as open evidence. Open evidence is a powerhouse AI tool that uses literature from all the disputable journal articles and helps bring all this information to the fingertips of a treating physician. One of the clinicians who wrote about this product said 17 years of kind of expectation for something new and novel to actually reach the bedside has now been reduced to 17 seconds because the physician or treating clinician can talk to a patient, pull up their open evidence application prompt the AI for information regarding a specific treatment tailored to this individual patients overall health and medical record and have a discussion at the point of care. This is going to revolutionize the way we practice medicine and especially regenerative medicine where research is coming out at fast pace and patients are always looking for the latest innovations and technology to help them kind of get through the decision making process of what works for them, what works for. And what fits their needs as an individual. So you are ahead of a company called vinyl chat and your head of business development and so tell us a little bit about that because that specializes in telehealth space and we know that that's mostly in the hospital. But there is a growing trend of telehealth in the aesthetics base. How do you see the growth? That's a great question. I think if you look back before the COVID pandemic telemedicine was a novelty. It was not widely adopted even in the hospital setting and because of COVID and the need to think about innovative ways to reach patients where they are telemedicine exploded zoom health was a mainstay. The number of telemedicine companies has rapidly expanded bottle chat is focused in the area of building a platform from the software side first using an AI native platform that enables what we call visual language models. So what we've been able to do is enable better care in the hospital setting. You can imagine a patient within a room has a television screen. Now we're going to enable nursing care to come in through the TV through a camera and a speaker to really deliver them personalized care at the bedside while the nurse who is there physically can go and attend other patients and do with other issues. So you can imagine this becomes a care delivery model which enables nurses to take care of more patients at the same time gives them the patient the ability to communicate with someone at any time. And also engages the family members who may be coming in from long distances to be a part of the care plan. If a physician is rounding in the morning at seven in the morning and walks into a room for an elderly patient, we can't expect all the key family members to be there. But through virtual care platforms like bottle chat, we can enable that communication to take place seamlessly. And that has translated into opportunities to expand virtual care outside of the hospital to the bedside and also to the home. And so some of the products we're working on and are just recently launched include the ability to overlay our AI software and our medical grade surveillance and algorithms into home cameras such as the green camera. This will enable folks to really monitor their loved ones in the home setting without having to constantly check your individual phone and look at a camera to make sure your family member is safe or there hasn't been an emergency that hasn't been responded to. So we're really excited about this technology being broadly adopted within the regular population outside of the hospital because we think the impact of this will allow for continuous proactive analytical and AI to care. So when I think about this, I almost think there could be opportunities for like plastic surgery care. And that somebody who is recovering from plastic surgery, especially like a full body makeover, they wouldn't need to have to transport to the doctor's office that there would be some way that they can get on a telehealth platform and be able to have the doctor either watch them and like how would that work, you know. And that's a great continuation of where we see the applications of this in the regenerative medicine, aesthetic medicine, position medicine space. So you can think of video enabled care as something where you can fill in the gaps and determine signal from video. So if you're looking at a patient as a physician, we're using our eyes to examine a patient looking at their skin, their body affect their tone, their movement, their range of motion. That can all be captured on video and if you have the right AI system behind it, you can interpret that and send signals. One example is we were able to look at patients lying in a patient bed and can determine if the patient is moving what part of their body might be outside of the gurney or outside of the bed. If they sit up, if they finish consuming their meal, that they've had any signs of respiratory distress or maybe a association or swallowing some of their food, all these signals can be translated into a clinic setting. We work, look at patients who are coming in for examinations of their skin of a body part post surgical care and then we can also translate into the home setting. It can also enable the ability to look at conditions that require interventions such as a prescription, but without need for a full physical exam. So you imagine how many people are coming in for skin issues and how many dermatologists or spastic surgeons are touching and poking your skin. They can look at it and using their own eyes and experience or an AI tool that's helping provide diagnosis. They can then make that quick decision and say, okay, this patient has a standard case of eczema or psoriasis or something that requires early treatment. And therefore we can alleviate some of the burden on the clinical staff, patients who have become from long distances, hopefully reduce costs, increase efficiency and give the patient a better experience. So is that software is something that like the patient at home can log into and the software is able to look at the patient and gather information. for the doctor to see on the other side? Is that how it would work? - Every use case is different, but yes, essentially that is the capability of the software. It would require obviously consent and permissions from the patient. We would have to be part of the care teams plan to enable this because you don't want uni directional data transfers. If you can imagine a patient sending me all of their video of their skin exam and no one's on the other side receiving it, it's not become efficient. If you have a physician that's caring for you for a specific condition and may not be in the vicinity or you've been referred to a specialist for a certain type of skin condition that's out of the city or out of the state, there may be opportunities for that in the ration to take place and it would be asynchronous, meaning that you don't need to be on at the same time. So you can go and say that my rash is evolved a little bit, the colors change, the size is changed. Let me just mark it, take a picture, take a video, send it to the care team, they interpret it and they come back with appropriate next step. So it's really convenient for the patient. It is something we want to respect privacy security and make sure that everyone is bought into the care path because the workflow is going to be different. There used to be you have to come in every few weeks. You'd have to make sure that the prescribing physician or the clinician who's taking care of you is physically available and can see you. And then you also have to make sure to align with your personal schedule. So this alleviates some of those concerns for travel and inconvenience. - You know, I almost think like this would be cool for like veterinary, right? 'Cause I don't know how many times I've taken my dogs in and it's like the vet looks at my dog for like a second. Like, okay, well, yeah, we're just gonna give them some, you know, quarter zone or we're gonna give them this medicine and it's so traumatic for a lot of animals to go to the vet and you know, and I had a horse. So imagine that like it would have been great to be able to jump on a camera or send a picture or something and have the vet on the other side instead of the vet coming out. Like, do you see this kind of going beyond just hospital settings? And I mean, I know going to aesthetics is pushing it but like, what about veterinary care? - Well, you bring up a great point and our company, Vital Chat, is not vet chat yet. But of course, if there's a market and we wanna take care of our customers. But you know what, it is a way of the future. I think as the technology, hardware, software development costs all come down. People will realize that some things can be taken care remotely and you don't need to physically look, feel and touch every single thing before you as a trained professional, a vet of veterinarian, pharmacist, a nurse, a doctor, a dentist. You don't necessarily need to touch and feel everything to quickly reach some diagnosis. And the scary part is, is right now because of AI, I think a lot of patients who are in that position of not having access, not having transportation, not having funds, not having the ability to see the right type of provider or clinician, they're starting to utilize AI. They're starting to utilize, and they've always been utilizing the internet to find things. They used to be, they would Google their symptoms or Google something, my pet has a lung. And then obviously the first thing to come back is cancer and if it's pet owners out or family members out. But now with the AI, it's getting a little bit more sophisticated where it can give you, it'll ask you maybe some questions. It will show up and give you a differential that maybe will say, this is most likely, so you don't have to worry, but if you have these signs symptoms, so it is getting to what we call deviating into the realm of software as a medical device, which used to be strictly regulated. But I think with the rapid advances in software in AI and in various countries that are pursuing different strategies, that that line is getting blurred. And so a lot of opportunities for companies to release products that provide that information using AI are surfacing quickly. And without the regulatory bodies catching up to them right now. - Yeah, I mean, I definitely see there's a lot of benefit from it, especially if you got like a rash or you're sick, it just limits the number of people are going to emergency rooms and all of that. But then in a way, it's kind of, when I think about that, AI and everything's all remote now, it's like you do lose some of that human touch, right? And I think that's where it's important as our society moves forward, we want convenience, but we also want to maintain human relationships. And it's like where's that line and how do we determine? Like we've gone too far. I mean, we just in the speaking session, somebody was talking about how much time like some people spend, like their only interaction or communication is with their AI and not a human, which is insane. So yeah, I think that's a very interesting future for us. - Well, thank you so much for stopping by and chatting. I think there's a lot in this space and we'll continue to kind of dive deep and talk to as many people as we can across the full spectrum. And that's really where my interest comes in. I want to learn from the doctors who are doing these clinicals from a very, you know, and we medicine, science, data, evidence-driven platform. But also I'm out there looking at what's happening in the biohacking world, right? Like I feel like that's like two extremes. And in between, there's so much going on and how do you bridge the science so that it can become more mainstream? I mean, I started using red light therapy, gosh, maybe seven years, six, seven years ago. I would sit there in my room naked in front of my red light and my husband would come in and he's like, what are you doing? And I said, I'm feeding my to country, yeah. (laughs) And he thought it was just the craziest thing and then he had back pain and I told him, I was like, here, sit in front of this red light for like 15 minutes and then, you know, through time, he started, I would come in the room and he's laying there in front of red light. And, you know, and it's like, I almost feel like redemption sitting in the talk today when they talked about the red and infrared and how it mimics the morning and sunset light because I have my red light panel in my bathroom. So when I'm in the morning brushing my teeth, I turn that on when I'm brushing my teeth at night and do my teen, I turn that on. So I kind of mimicked that, but I think living in California, we kind of don't have to worry about so much of that, but especially people who live in parts of the world where they don't have that, you know, sun, it is really important. And I just felt like so much redemption sitting there because everybody thought I was creating me on me as far as my friends. I thought I was crazy with my red light and now everybody's doing so. Feel a little redemption there. But yeah, I mean, is there anything else like you kind of, you know, like gets you excited about this space? Like, I mean, you know, they ask the panelists, where do you see things in five years? Like what would you like to see in five years? - Great question. And hopefully when your husband was using the red light, he was also not naked, but that would be a different story. So I think I'm most excited about, you know, this concept of the AI driven, proactive, personalized approach to regenerative medicine and healthcare. I think we are moving away from being reactive as a sick care society to measure health or measure life in the number of years. I think we're moving to a proactive approach that's driven by personalized medicine, analytics, AI enabled decision support to create quality of life and health span measured in how you live, not how long you live. And so I'm really excited to think about how we can institute some of these practices early on and be more preventative. Obviously, from a surgical perspective, I would love to have people not need to have joint replacement surgery or have, you know, conditions that are preventable and have to go and fix it. We want to find the causes of these, what happens with behaviors or the genetics. And if we can do things that will reduce the likelihood of these people having these conditions and you care, we'll alleviate a lot of burden on our healthcare system. And I think it can serve multitude of purposes, could be in behavioral help, could be in aesthetic medicine, could be in orthopedics, could be in pediatrics. I think that's what I'm interested excited about that there seems to be generalized adoption with 80% of physicians now admitting they use AI, 40% of physicians admitting they're using open evidence, which is a super powered, again, knowledge repository that they can use at the bedside. And then just today, the release of a chat GPT for clinician only. It's showing that the focus is on, you know, providing the kind of key gatekeepers to therapy, to medical advice. With the tools, I need to make sure that there's still the trusted source. And as you said, keeping the human or clinician in the loop is really important because there is a lot of risk and danger as well with AI basically running rampant and assuming the role of that care provider or a primary care physician. If someone is chatting with their, you know, one medical or Amazon health agent, thinking it's a clinician that's regards just the AI chatbot. We're gonna have a growing number of people in the population relying on that for medical care. And as we know, there have been some very stirring events where people have been counseled by the AI to do things that cause cell harm or have hurt others. And so we wanna make sure that we're using the AI proactively, we're using it safely and we're trusting that we need, human interinterpretation and collaboration to make sure that you can avoid some of the pitfalls. Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us today. Wrong. Thank you. This is The Matrix Method. Join us every Monday for a new episode.