Interview with Matthew Holt

The Health Care Blog

October 2024

I caught up with Matthew Holt of The Health Care Blog. 

“Digital health services, in general, have been launched too early — because too many of them were launched without a clear way to help get big numbers of people on board and extract the people using them from other types of health services,” said Matthew Holt.  

Many of you know Matthew Holt — one the original leaders of digital health and arguably it’s greatest early promoter with the conference Health 2.0. Matthew has seen decades of digital health services launched — many succeeding and scaling and many more not reaching scale. 

“You and I know these tools have been around for basically 20 years now and we didn't figure out how to get them to scale,” Matthew added.

Matthew’s concern, one I share, is that maybe digital health has missed the window to really impact healthcare: to improve outcomes and reduce costs. 

He sees an industry where health systems have consolidated, turning as he would say into “RVU machines” and where insurers have grown huge with pressure on revenue and profitability. He also fears these large organizations no longer have a real incentive to change in the places where digital health can impact the broader system – population health, 24/7 management, chronic disease care, etc. 

“Okay, we have this software; it can be a digital therapeutic, a patient communication app, a virtual clinic, etc.," explained Matthew. "And now with AI rolling on top making it even more effective – things many of us have talked about that many aspects of this forever – we could be treating chronically ill people with fewer resources." 

Matthew said this with sadness in his tone.

"Instead, we’ve siloed people even further and, for example, even more younger people are getting hip and knee replacements," he added. “So I guess we launched too early as we didn’t get to really impact healthcare, and now what is launching, I fear, is too late.”

Thank you for sharing your insights, Matthew!