All You’ll Ever Need To Read About Digital Health— A digital health jumpstarter

Alternative titles:

• Healthcare is broke(n)
• “Have you heard of this thing called ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS??”
• moar newsletters

1. A Quick And Dirty Definition

Digital health is the digitization of healthcare: taking processes and procedures that were originally done manually (or perhaps previously deemed impossible) and instead completing them with software and hardware. Examples include telemedicine, electronic medical records, disease management mobile apps, and even wearables that track biometrics. The term generally refers to technology developed in the past 15 or so years. Traditional medical devices like MRI machines are not typically thought of as digital health. However, the combination of MRI machines with modern technologies like IoT so that MRI machines proactively analyze and share runtime efficiency would be considered digital health. People are excited about digital health because it presents an opportunity to possibly provide more people with better care at lower costs (Triple Aim)… and plenty of potential profit to be made in the meantime.

For more detailed introductions to digital health:

• Rock Health’s (premier digital health-focused VC) definition: https://rockhealth.com/what-digital-health-is-and-isnt/
• Redox recaps what 70 digital health companies do: https://www.redoxengine.com/blog/70-health-tech-companies-disrupting-healthcare/

2. What You Need To Read

I know at this point everyone is inundated with newsletters and their summer reading lists are impossibly long. However, more and more often, I have a friend that needs to get smart on digital health very quickly. Maybe for a consulting project or a new area of interest for their VC. Whatever the case, I’ve found a few resources that help me passively stay up to date and informed on the latest digital health news with minimal time investment.

Da Newsletters:

• CB Insights Digital Health: I don’t know who Nikhil Krishnan is but I seriously want to give him a big, fat hug for running such an amazing digital health newsletter. Infused with the typical CB Insights cheekiness and tantalizing data visuals / market maps, this is a must-read that has made me seem way better read than I actually am too many times.
• Rock Health: The premier source for digital health news, Rock Health, along with its investing arm, has a strong research arm that produces quality original content. Their newsletter has the latest funding trends, industry trends, and digital health news from other sources. Rock Health also has an amazing job board if you want to work in the industry.
• Fortune Brainstorm Health: Not solely focused on digital health, but decidedly bent on it, Fortune takes a deeper, more prose-like journalistic approach. The editor writes an opinionated few paragraphs on a choice topic to open the newsletter, and then each article linked in the newsletter has a beefy enough description of it instead of the usual one-liner other newsletters have which helps build context for readers less familiar with the healthcare industry.

Latest Buzzwords and Goss’:

• Blockchains for biomedicine and health care are coming. Buyer: be informed — Really great overview and resources to stay in touch with blockchain healthcare applications
• Amazon’s Strategy in Healthcare — Written by my fav digital health analyst Nikhil from CB Insights. This helps encapsulate a lot of the drama from recent Amazon healthcare hires and acquisitions.

Digital Health Industry Hubs w/ the Nitty Gritty

These sites are all pretty similar. I don’t really actively browse them, but find myself gravitating towards them when I’m googling for more information on a topic because they’re respectable sources that do their homework (unlike that digital health startup that’s writing “unbiased” marketing “content”):

• MobiHealthNews
• HealthcareITNews: Pretty similar to mobihealth

Stuff No One Else Has Heard Of Yet

The real stuff: if you honestly want the MOST cutting edge information on digital health, not the canned stuff in newsletters, I’ve found you have to follow people in-the-know on Linkedin. Maybe it’s the Chief Data Scientist of a health AI startup you really like or a very passionate health tech-y PhD student (or even a useless MBA?! who knows…). That’s where the wacky good stuff is.

3. What Did I Miss?

This is what I use to stay up-to-date, but I’m curious: what have you found helpful to read?