What’s the Difference Between Health IT (HCIT) and Digital Health?
A fairly decent AI-generated photo titled “Digital Health vs. Health IT”
I usually don’t bother myself with the conversations of what to call the sector we work in (digital health! health tech! healthcare IT! just plain healthcare!), because we have bigger fish to fry than nomenclature.
But recently I asked folks on X, “What (if any) is the difference between Healthcare IT and Digital Health?” and got 66 pretty interesting answers.
But first, I wanted to share a quick backstory on the term digital health.
When we started Rock Health back in 2010-2011, there was no good term for this emerging sector. Healthcare IT was in use, but really didn’t seem to encompass the variety of business models and products we were helping bring to life.
When we publicly launched, at SXSW 2011, reporters used terms like mobile health, mHealth, and Health 2.0 (on the heels of Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 movement) to describe our work.
The (now defunct) Health 2.0 conference organizers were not very pleased with other organizations using the term “Health 2.0”. They didn’t want this to be an industry term, they wanted it to be their brand.
So, I promised not to use “health 2.0” in our marketing materials and then went out of my way to tell reporters to use another term. But what term should we use?
We didn’t like mobile health or mHealth, because not every Rock Health startup had an app. And Health IT felt very old-school and didn’t quite seem to fit what we were doing.
So we needed to pick something else.
Our community discussed this over lunch and we coalesced around the term “digital health” which I first heard used by our early supporter Dr. Eric Topol. We didn’t want to own or trademark the term. We just needed something to describe this emerging group of startups.
And that, my friends, is how the term “digital health” came to popular use.
(A decade ago, my colleague Malay Gandhi wrote a great post, What Digital Health Is (and Isn’t) that is still worth a read.)
So back to my question, “What (if any) is the difference between Healthcare IT and Digital Health?”.
A lot of folks chimed in that the difference between the two terms lies the business model. For tools and apps paid for and used by healthcare organizations (B2B), that would be considered health IT. For products consumers pay for, that would be digital health.
In this definition, a company like Veeva (the $30B, publicly traded cloud-based software for life sciences) would be considered Healthcare IT. And a company like Hims & Hers (the $1.7B, publicly traded telehealth company that sells prescription and OTC drugs online) would be digital health.
“I like to think of it in terms of business models. Healthcare IT = Healthcare SaaS: akin to B2B enterprise software firms, with a focus on recurring, stable revenue streams. Digital Health companies, however, are more 'tech-enabled'—spanning B2B, B2C, or B2B2C models, often with transactional, dynamic revenue patterns, as opposed to recurring.”
- Eli Ben-Joseph, Co-founder and CEO of Regard
Some felt like healthcare IT is a subcategory of digital health, while others suggested just the opposite.
“Everything in digital health that I could think of relies on Health IT done well, with very few exceptions. Is Digital Health then a subclass of Health IT? No, in fact its everything done after Health IT works that makes it useful.”
- Keith Boone, Standards Guru for PointClickCare
The word “infrastructure” came up a lot related to Health IT, with anything patient-facing being digital health. Some suggestions people gave for how to differentiate the two:
Front end vs. back end
Patient-facing vs. provider-facing
Outside the hospital walls vs. inside the hospital walls
Infrastructure vs. apps
Servicing the patient vs. servicing the provider
Health of the individual vs. health of the balance sheet
Some folks shared fun analogies. “Daryn Nakhuda, Head of Software at Waabi said “HCIT is driver assistance (emergency braking, acc, lane keeping) and Digital Health is real level 4 automated driving.”
Mindaugas Galvosas, MD made the comparison of a gaming console (Healthcare IT) to the actual video games (Digital Health).
Angel investor Manish Balakrishnan pointed out that maybe it has more to do with who is building the product:
“Healthcare IT - Where Healthcare organizations used technology to remake and automate existing processes and workflows. Digital Health - A outside in approach to reimagine Healthcare from user centric experience and build technology to accomplish that.”
Or perhaps these two terms are simply interchangeable. Healthcare VC Brad Otto shared, “As an investor in this sector, there’s no difference.” Journalist Sally James said the only difference is in the marketing: “The difference is who they are trying to attract to the product/service/investment.”
I agree with VC Derek J. Mazur who said they are the same, with healthcare IT simply being more a more antiquated term. And TJ Parker who said:
That was fun, but let’s get back to work
Wrapping up this enlightening discussion…
The term Healthcare IT was born in an era where B2B models dominated and direct-to-consumer healthcare businesses were just a blip on the horizon, so there’s no wonder we associate Healthcare IT with B2B, healthcare infrastructure companies.
The term Digital Health was popularized during a time when exciting new healthcare products and business models were being introduced (thanks to record levels of venture funding) and is more associated with products built in the last 5-10 years.
Yet, some folks still hold on to the term Healthcare IT, perhaps out of habit or maybe because it resonates with a time when we were just beginning to explore the potential of technology in healthcare.
But here's the thing: Whether we call it Healthcare IT, Digital Health, or even Health 2.0 😜, it's not the terminology that's going to move the needle in healthcare. What matters is the work we're doing— building new tools to fundamentally change our healthcare system for the better.
I always say the best part of working in healthcare is the people.
Our sector— whatever you want to call it— attracts the smartest, most passionate innovators looking to put their talents to good use. Whether it's developing sophisticated back-end systems to streamline provider workflows or crafting user-friendly apps that empower patients, every contribution moves us in the right direction. So call it what you want, and let’s get back to work.