Verizon Is Betting Big on Healthcare. Six Hours Inside Its LA Lab Showed Why.

At the 2nd Annual Verizon Healthcare on Air Summit, co-hosted by Robin Goldsmith and Brian Urban MS MBA MPH, leaders from payers, providers, life sciences and medtech traded talking points for candor, while holograms, private networks and a phone that reads your vital signs made the case for what comes next.

Zachary Fink held his phone up to his face, told a room of health care executives to stay quiet, and started counting down.

"Hopefully my vital signs are normal while presenting," said Fink, the founder and CEO of VyTrac Health, "but we're going to do this live, everybody." Thirty seconds of staring into a smartphone camera later, the app returned more than 20 health metrics, including a stress reading derived from the intervals between his heartbeats. The demonstration took place in a corner of Verizon's Innovation Lab in Los Angeles, a few steps from an NFL sideline communications kit and a mobile clinic that cleans itself when a sensor says the air needs it.

It was a fitting image for the day. On Thursday, October 8, 2026, Verizon opened that lab to the 2nd Annual Healthcare on Air Summit, a six-hour, jam-packed run of panels, demos and hallway conversations co-hosted by Robin Goldsmith of Verizon Business and Brian Urban of Duo Health. The message underneath all of it was hard to miss. Verizon is betting big on health care, and it wants to be more than the pipe the data travels through.

The bet

"Putting my Verizon hat on," Goldsmith said during the rural health panel, connectivity and devices "that can pick up things earlier and prevent things from getting more chronic" are critical. "So I think we're super passionate about it, Verizon, and trying to really be a better stakeholder and trying to make this happen."

The lab tour made that concrete. Verizon staff walked attendees through private cellular networks that can be deployed inside and outside hospital walls, portable kits designed to keep operations running during disasters, and the sideline system Verizon built with the NFL after play-calling was disrupted by network interruptions. A mobile clinic used for telemedicine runs an automated cleaning cycle triggered by a connected sensor, and a camera platform can flag when someone has been inside the unit too long. Fink's company uses Verizon connectivity to send readings from cellular-enabled blood pressure cuffs and scales straight to a clinician's dashboard, with no Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or app required. His oldest patient, he said, is 102.

"The biggest problem in healthcare is that it's completely reactive," Fink said. That sentence could have been the summit's subtitle.

The candor

What set the day apart was not the hardware. It was how frankly people talked. Rock Health's Riaz Ali said so from the stage: "One of the other things that was, I think, very pleasantly surprising is the fact that there's a lot of candor. So call a spade a spade."

That candor ran in every direction. A hospital chief medical officer publicly pushed back on Mark Cuban. A health tech executive said he disagreed with Cuban too, "and I may be the only one." An ARPA-H official called the shortage of cardiologists in rural America "honestly gross." A biotech CEO who considers health care overregulated argued that AI needs more rules, not fewer. And WHOOP's chief medical officer, appearing as a hologram, discussed the importance of collaboration and invited Optum's Dr. Eugene Hsu, MD, MBA to explore opportunities on stage.

The room itself was the other story. Payers, providers, life sciences companies, medtech and device makers, federal officials, investors and startup founders shared the same rows, and the networking between sessions was as dense as the agenda. For a sector that usually meets in silos, the mix was the point.

The sessions

Mark Cuban opened the day with a broadside against health care's middlemen, a prediction that claims will give way to invoices, and a vision of personalized drugs manufactured in tractor-trailer-sized pods.

The first panel, "The Invisible EHR," moderated by Brian Urban, brought together WHOOP, UC San Diego Health, GripDynamix and Optum to argue that the best sensor is the one you forget you are wearing, and that utility, repeated over time, is what earns trust.

"The Government's Trillion-Dollar Bet," moderated by Robin Goldsmith, put Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H)'s Dr. Rafid Fadul, MD, MBA (by hologram) alongside UC San Diego Health, AscendRural, the City of Arcadia Health Commission and The Simi Group, The to ask what the Rural Health Transformation Program leaves behind when the money stops.

"Shared-Risk Success in a Value-Based Care World," moderated by James Edwards of ALT+J Holdings, featured Prime Healthcare, Partners in Care Foundation and Enlace Health on why fax machines still define the industry and how shared risk can actually work.

"Technology as an Enabler," moderated by Chris Spearman of ScaleHealth, banned the words "AI" and "technology" and asked Duo Health, Proto Hologram and a home health infrastructure company what they actually deliver, and what should never be automated. Read: Ban the Words "AI" and "Technology," and See What Health Tech Is Really For.

"The Living Room Lab," moderated by Matt Cybulsky, PhD of Catalant , began with care at home and ended with Seek Labs, Rock Health and TailorCare debating AI, regulation and moral responsibility.

The day closed with a fireside chat, "Breaking the System," featuring Lisa Marceau of Alpha Millennial Health, on patients bypassing the primary care model.

The throughline

If one idea connected the sessions, it was this: the tools are mostly here, and the system is not ready for them. Jamey Edwards put it most bluntly at the close of his panel. "If you fix payment, all those technologies you guys heard about in the last sessions will come to fruition," he said. "But if you don't fix payment, we're still going to be in the realm of the fax and the CD-ROM."

Verizon is wagering that it can help close that gap, with networks, devices and a lab where health systems and startups can test ideas before they go live. Whether that bet pays off will depend on the people who were in the room on Thursday: the payers, providers, drug developers and device makers who spent six hours telling each other the truth. We were glad to be among them.

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