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Unlocking Value in Digital Health

Challenges and Opportunities to Implementing High-Value Technologies

In 2023, the Peterson Center on Healthcare conducted in-depth market research to understand specific challenges and drivers of digital health purchasing.

Digital health technologies have the potential to revolutionize healthcare delivery and can be deployed to produce better health outcomes, improve patient experience, promote equity, and lower costs.

Recent studies have found that these digital tools can provide access to effective treatments remotely, help patients manage chronic diseases, and facilitate access to timely care.

However, unlike other sectors where the introduction of automation and technology tends to reduce costs, technological advancements in healthcare have often led to increasing costs and only marginal improvements in quality. The last decade has witnessed a major boom in digital health technology investment, despite limited evidence about the clinical and economic impact of new apps, digital therapeutics, remote patient monitoring, and other technologies. Without a clear regulatory pathway or independent assessor, healthcare stakeholders struggle to make decisions regarding coverage, price, and investments for these technologies.

The market review is based on in-depth interviews with executives from leading payers, self-insured employers, innovators, and other stakeholder organizations to explore current decision-making processes and pain points around digital health development, evaluation, and adoption.

This market review examines the current state of the digital health purchasing environment and highlights opportunities to improve contracting for and uptake of high-value digital health tools.

Key Findings

Purchasers face significant challenges in making digital health coverage decisions, including:
  • Being overwhelmed by the volume of technology solutions on the market that lack credible, comparable data
  • Facing competing incentives and complex interests
  • The lack of centralized decision-making

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Unlocking Value in Digital Health: Challenges and Opportunities to Implementing High-Value Technologies

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