The U.S. poured even more money into healthcare in 2024, devoting nearly 18% of the nation’s GDP to the cause. But even with spending vastly outpacing international peers, we continue to lag behind other countries in life expectancy.
Digital health solutions — from telemedicine to remote patient monitoring — have long promised to bring down the cost of healthcare by enabling healthcare providers to deliver more personalized and accessible care.
While digital health has improved access and automation in certain areas, it has fallen short of transforming whole-person care delivery. On paper, digital health solutions may appear to incrementally improve performance metrics, but they haven’t resulted in sweeping change.
To truly transform care delivery and outcomes, the healthcare industry needs a new generation of integrated digital health solutions designed to move beyond fragmented systems and coordinate enterprise-wide actions for holistic, patient-centered care.
How the Current Digital Health Model Fails Patients
The siloed nature of healthcare organizations is one of the most significant barriers to improving health equity. Within organizations — whether payer, provider or another healthcare entity — each department typically operates according to its own priorities and performance targets.
For example, care management programs focus on consumers likely to require near-term hospital services, while population health programs target consumers at risk of neglecting preventative screenings.
In this paradigm, digital health solutions streamline specific departmental processes. Tools are transaction-oriented, optimizing workflows like appointment scheduling and billing with limited communication and consumer data-sharing across departments.
To the consumer, this fragmentation manifests as a disjointed care journey. A patient managing multiple chronic conditions might receive uncoordinated messages — like medication adherence reminders from one team and preventative screening outreach from another — which can feel overwhelming and create frustration with the system.
Limited data-sharing across departments also obscures crucial non-medical health-related information. Factors like housing or patient mobility challenges are often left unrecorded or siloed within a specific program, preventing care teams from forming a complete picture of a patient’s needs.
By focusing on limited, incremental improvements within silos, the current model for digital health limits its potential to provide coordinated care.
What would it take to build a truly integrated, enterprise-wide approach to digital health?
It’s Time to Think Enterprise Digital Health
A holistic approach to digital health — one that prioritizes data-driven care coordination and proactive risk management — offers a path for addressing systemic inefficiencies and low health outcomes.
With that in mind, the next generation of digital health solutions must do the following:
- Enable robust data collection and integration across the organization.
Digital health point solutions tend to inherit the limitations of legacy systems. These systems silo consumer data by department, limiting their ability to aggregate and share clinical, administrative, and non-medical health information across the organization.
Instead, organizations need digital health solutions that enable seamless, enterprise-wide data collection and integration. This includes the ability to unify disparate data sources across the healthcare ecosystem, such as a provider’s clinical data, a patient’s administrative data like basic profile and past medical history, as well as data on key social determinants they may face — like mental health conditions or housing insecurity.
A comprehensive consumer data framework allows each department to contribute to a unified understanding of patient needs, particularly barriers to care. In turn, this lays the foundation for coordinating care and engaging with the consumer for better results.
Organizations like mPulse are already addressing this need by uniting predictive analytics, behavioral science, and omnichannel engagement into scalable enterprise platforms that support more coordinated and equitable care.
Predict risk and identify critical intervention points.
Traditional risk prediction methods rely heavily on recent healthcare visit patterns. But this framework often overlooks patients with rising risks tied to social determinants. These patients are more likely to delay care, which can result in preventable emergency visits and hospitalizations that drive up costs downstream.
To address this gap, digital health platforms must use advanced analytics to identify nuanced, individual-level risk indicators before they escalate. When clinical, administrative and non-medical data is integrated across departmental silos, health plans or providers can proactively identify risks and intervention points that will have the most impact.
Armed with advanced analytics that provide actionable insights, care teams can more proactively address barriers to care, rather than intervening after a patient’s condition worsens.
Coordinate outreach with hyper-personalized communication.
Disjointed outreach efforts can confuse patients and reduce the effectiveness of engagement strategies.
For example, consider a patient receiving reminders from separate health organizations about a yearly mammogram, steps for continual diabetes management, and flu vaccine scheduling. From the patient’s perspective, the flurry of messages may feel intrusive and overwhelming.
With an integrated digital health solution, these messages could instead be consolidated into a single stream of outreach that helps patients prioritize the most urgent action items while providing helpful information on secondary concerns.
Communications must be personalized and shared in a digestible format, such as linking to a short blog with helpful infographics rather than a long, complex report.
Behavioral science further amplifies impact by tailoring messaging to match motivational profiles and reduce common barriers like inertia, fear, or confusion — especially for consumers facing health disparities – ensuring that outreach doesn’t just inform, but actively drives action by simplifying complex decisions and building trust over time.
Additionally, using an omnichannel approach — including SMS, email, and mobile web channels, and even phone or print channels when appropriate — ensures patients receive this communication through their preferred method to further boost engagement.
Unlocking the Promise of Digital Health Technology
Digital health still holds immense promise — but only if we break out of the siloed systems that limit its impact. An enterprise-wide approach is essential to address the systemic inefficiencies and inequities plaguing care delivery. Health organizations can begin by mapping engagement efforts across departments, identifying overlap, and piloting coordinated outreach for high-need populations.
Only by rethinking how we design, deploy, and scale digital health solutions can we truly deliver on their potential to improve care, equity, and outcomes.
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