Introducing the digital health tech stack

So you’re starting a digital health company. If you’re providing care to patients as part of the experience, you’ll have a lot of decisions ahead of you about where to invest vital development resources. That’ll bring you to your tech stack, ranging from your EHR to your API for ordering lab tests.

To help guide that process, my colleague Marissa Schlueter and I have spent the past few months going deep on the tech stack companies. And we’ve asked founders as well as product /operations leaders how they’re making all important build vs. buy decisions.

We’re doing that because funds we respect like a16z and Greycroft are betting big that the future of digital health isn’t just the care experiences. It’s the software toolset, i.e. the “building blocks,” that makes all of that happen in a more efficient and more scalable way. What remains to be seen is whether these tools that are custom built for digital health can migrate over to the enterprise. The big question on everyone’s minds here is around the Total Addressable Market or TAM. But the positive here is that it may be enough, at least for a while, to sell into other startups. As we’re seeing time and time again, digital health is selling into digital health and becoming unicorns in the process.