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The New Tech Stack for Virtual-First Care
- The healthcare technology market is projected to enter a new golden era, driven by a tipping point in size and growth that creates demand for new operating systems supporting virtual-first care models.
- Companies are currently split between building ground-up tech stacks over the last 18 months and licensing off-the-shelf systems customized at significant cost.
- Modern technology and AI are expected to replace human labor and unproductive IT products to deliver high-quality care at a fraction of the cost and with dramatically higher scale.
- A significant risk exists where companies reinvest cost savings into repeatedly developing identical operating system components within separate walled gardens, resulting in inefficiency.
- Early emergence is occurring in clinical operations (care coordination, virtual networks, labs, pharmacy, home health), back-office administration (revenue cycle, credentialing, supply chain), and front-office administration (customer engagement, scheduling, patient acquisition).
- Capabilities must support risk-bearing models, recurring revenue, cash pay, and membership-based approaches, with entities like Cerebrae offering actuarial capabilities as a service to underwrite risk.
- Winners are expected to rapidly expand service areas to capture value across categories, utilizing high-volume transactions for stickiness and leveraging network effects at stakeholder intersections where historical integration was difficult.
- Successful firms will follow executable paths to sell to incumbents, capitalizing on the trend where most legacy players are adopting virtual-first care to expand the addressable market.
- The quality bar for healthcare products is rising to require world-class technology, including superior user experience, UI, high-scale performance, modern APIs, and compliance features.
- Improvements in user experience and performance initiated by digital health companies are anticipated to eventually seep into traditional care delivery organizations as they modernize.
- Companies such as TruPill and Ribbon Health are expanding into telehealth, labs, and financial transactions to integrate tightly into core workflows, while Eligible connects providers and payers to automate eligibility verification.
- Digital health startups are positioned to accelerate time to market by focusing on higher-order product elements rather than rebuilding foundational tech infrastructure.