Thoughts on digital health
Last week we published a Special Report on digital health. This is the first time we’ve published an in-depth report on this topic, but most likely won’t be the last.
The report looks at the major avenues and frontiers of innovation in healthcare’s digital revolution, and includes case study interviews of eight different digital health companies at the forefront of this: Healthhero, Kry, Arts en Zorg, Health Navigator, Helfie AI, Clue, Hellobetter and Flow Neuroscience.
Some of the things these companies are doing are pretty astounding: Helfie AI’s app that can tell you how likely you are to have a range of common health conditions by analysing a photo you take on your phone of a body part or an audio recording of a cough, and Flow Neuroscience’s headset that delivers electrical stimulation to the brain to treat depression and other mental health issues, both feel like they could have come out of a sci fi novel or movie.
But I was equally excited to learn about the incredible progress being made with less sci-fi-esque technologies. Dutch group Arts en Zorg and Nordic group Kry, both of which describe themselves as ‘digital-first’ digi-physical primary healthcare providers, have each found that they can deal with the majority of their inbound patient interactions remotely, simply by leveraging what people in the industry call ‘asynchronous chat’, and what everyone else calls text messaging.
This means that many more patient interactions can be handled simultaneously, since a clinician can speak to multiple patients simultaneously via asynchronous chat. It also means the physical clinic only has to handle the things which can only be dealt with in-person. Arts en Zorg’s director Amon van den Borg tells us they are “now addressing what to do with the freefall of resources”.
So why aren’t all healthcare providers doing this? An obvious answer is that the usual culprits of misaligned incentives and stakeholders are standing in the way. Arts en Zorg has found that its ‘digital ring’ system works very well in its own clinics, but that it’s hard to get independent GP practices in the Netherlands to adopt it because doing so would mean losing revenue, since most of their reimbursement comes from fee-per-service payments from insurers.
Healthcare’s digitalisation has also probably been held back by the failures of the big telehealth groups which promised to revolutionise the sector, in particular Babylon and Teladoc — and, relatedly, by the mistaken belief that video consultations are the primary way of delivering healthcare digitally/remotely.
But I feel like there might be another issue holding back digital adoption, namely the way many in the sector see digital (and AI): as something foreign, a bit mysterious, that is over-hyped; or as something foreign and mysterious that will come in and miraculously ‘save’ the sector…rather than simply another tool that should be made use of where it has applicability, but which will only really provide benefit if married with (necessary) organisational and institutional change.
HBI Intelligence subscribers can download the full Digital Health Special Report 2025 here. Everyone else can download an executive summary of the report here.
We would welcome your thoughts on this story. Email your views to Martin De Benito Gellner or call 0207 183 3779.
