Walk into any hospital today and you’ll see the promise of digital health glowing on screens—electronic health records, AI diagnostics, telemedicine portals.
Now try being the patient who has to repeat their medical history three times because the systems don’t talk to each other. Try being the doctor who spends more time clicking through forms than looking a patient in the eye. Try being the founder whose “game-changing” health app gets stuck in regulatory purgatory while real people wait for care.
The technology exists. The need exists. The trust does not. And that’s why digital health is broken.
The False Finish Line
Most health startups celebrate a product launch like it’s the finish line. They’ve raised funds, built an app, integrated APIs, hired a marketing team. But in healthcare, the launch is just the starting point.
The real finish line is when a grandmother in Lucknow can get her lab results, book a follow-up, and understand her treatment plan without calling her nephew to “help with the app.” Until then, the product isn’t a solution—it’s a prototype in the wild.
This is the certainty we need to face: adoption is not about shipping features, it’s about removing friction until people forget the tech is even there.
The Trust Gap
Healthcare is personal. When you’re scared about a diagnosis or confused about a bill, you want a human face, not a chatbot prompt. But many digital health platforms treat the human layer as an optional add-on.
This creates a trust gap. Patients feel like data points. Clinicians feel like typists. And in that vacuum, adoption stalls because relatedness—the basic human need to feel understood—is missing from the user journey.
If digital health can’t close that gap, no amount of AI will matter.
The Interoperability Lie
Founders love to talk about “interoperability”—systems that share patient data seamlessly. In reality, most EHRs in India are silos guarded by vendors, each charging “integration fees” that smaller players can’t afford.
That’s not fairness. It’s a walled garden where only the biggest hospitals and platforms can play, leaving rural clinics and budget startups locked out.
A true fix means open APIs, adherence to ABDM standards, and penalties for data-hoarding practices. Patients should own their records, not rent access to them.
Regulation as a Moat
Many startups see regulation as a nuisance. They “work around” it to move faster. But in healthcare, cutting corners with patient safety or privacy is the quickest way to destroy your reputation.
Instead, treat compliance like status. Be the company that’s proud to pass audits, align with DPDP rules, and get ABDM-certified before it’s trendy. When patients see your privacy policy and actually understand it, they trust you. That trust is harder to copy than your code.
My Blueprint: The Four Anchors
After two decades in and around health tech, here’s the framework I’d build from scratch:
- Human-Centered Design – Every feature should solve a real patient or clinician pain point, tested in the field, not just in Figma.
- Radical Interoperability – Default to open standards, make switching costs zero, and let users control where their data goes.
- Regulatory-by-Design – Bake compliance into your architecture so you’re not scrambling later.
- Outcome-Based Metrics – Measure success by patient outcomes and system efficiency, not just app installs.
This gives founders and teams autonomy—a blueprint they can execute without waiting for someone else to fix the system.
The Missing Incentives
Right now, venture capital rewards user acquisition, not patient outcomes. Hospitals reward procedural volume, not preventive care. This warps the digital health ecosystem into chasing metrics that look good in reports but do little to improve lives.
We need reimbursement models that pay for results—like reduced readmission rates or faster diagnosis. That’s fairness for patients, providers, and payers alike.
The Talent Shift
If you want to fix digital health, you need more than engineers and doctors—you need both in the same room, speaking the same language.
Right now, the best product managers go to fintech or e-commerce because the rewards are bigger and the timelines shorter. We need to make healthcare tech a status choice—where the brightest minds go because the problems are hard, the stakes are high, and the impact is immediate.
The Trust Loop
The best systems learn from the people they serve. If a rural user can’t load your app on 3G, that’s feedback, not failure. If a diabetic patient logs in daily for six months and then stops, find out why.
This feedback loop builds relatedness—patients see their experiences shaping the platform, not just filling a survey. And clinicians start to feel like co-creators, not just end users.
The Fix Isn’t More Tech. It’s More Humanity.
Digital health will not be fixed by the next API, blockchain layer, or AI model alone. It will be fixed when we put people—not platforms—at the center.
My blueprint isn’t about inventing something nobody’s thought of. It’s about aligning what we already have—talent, tech, regulation, and trust—into a system that serves the patient first.
Because in healthcare, the measure of innovation isn’t how smart the tech is. It’s how invisible it feels when it’s working right.