The Cooling of Funding for Digital Health Is Healthy

We thought more apps and data would bring more health. What we got instead was more measuring and less listening.

I watched this trend: VCs pumped billions into health tech. Not because health was so complicated that you could engineer it. But because health affects a billion people and is worth billions. It was financial logic, not medical logic.

The apps that came were often useless. Contactless thermometers for your fever. Apps to count your steps. Systems to measure your sleep. These were not innovations. These were data-collection devices. They gave you more data about yourself, not better health for yourself.

What they did do: they made patients into consumers. You are no longer someone who is sick and goes to a doctor. You are now a health optimizer. You measure everything. You track trends. You are constantly in treatment of yourself.

This sounds empowering. In practice it is exhausting. You are perpetually made responsible for your own health in the form of measurement points that do not really say anything. You feel guilt if your steps are too low. You feel fear if your heart rate does something odd. You become addicted to numbers.

The oddity is that the place where health actually grows does not live in apps. Health lives in sleep. In rest rhythm. In food you recognize. In people around you. In movement outside. In less, not more.

So the cooling of funding is not a bad thing. It is the moment we say: maybe these were not the problems. Maybe the solution did not need more sensors, but less pressure. Not more data, but better listening.

I have seen this in organizations too. Consultants bring digitalization. They want to automate the system. They want multiple data points. They want visibility. What they do not want is to see the effort that human relationships cost. Digitalization accelerates efficiency, up to the point where you are analyzing all the work and doing nothing.

Health is not a problem you solve with more money. Health is something you build by slowly eating better, slowly moving more, slowly sleeping better. No VC fund can finance this. You must do it yourself.

So the cooling is actually warming. It is the moment we say: wait, what do we really want? And the answer is not: more data. The answer is: more rest.

Sources: Research on failed health tech companies; Lars Kepler article 'Why healthcare apps fail' (2023); observation of digitalization in healthcare.