No one wakes up hoping to use a hospital. Patients do not browse health systems the way they browse airlines, hotels, or retailers. They do not long for novelty, delight, or emotional connection in the usual sense. They arrive when something hurts, when something feels wrong, or when uncertainty becomes too heavy to ignore. In healthcare, usage is driven by need, not desire.

Healthcare is entering a phase where the economics of growth have fundamentally changed. The companies scaling fastest are not launching more features, more products, or more narrowly defined point solutions. Instead, they are making a different kind of investment by building platforms designed for reuse. These are not platforms as a branding flourish or aspirational label. They are platforms in the structural sense

Healthcare innovation still loves elegant stories. Unfortunately, elegant stories don’t get funded when budgets are constrained. For years, the industry has relied on value narratives that sound reasonable but collapse under scrutiny. The most common failure is distance in the value chain. They often sound like: “If imaging quality improves, outcomes improve. If outcomes improve, costs go down.” 

If you’ve attended any healthcare conference, a pattern emerges so consistently that it becomes impossible to ignore: healthcare is not suffering from a lack of innovation. It is suffering from an oversupply of disconnected innovations, where each one is well-intentioned, each one promising value, and each one adding yet another layer to an already unmanageable tech landscape.

The phrase “The U.S. healthcare system is broken” is common, but the core issue is structural. The system is privatized and built around a capitalist model. Within that framework, one flaw stands out: unlike nearly every other high-performing health system in the world, the United States lacks a true backbone. There is no layer that reliably guides people, connects decisions over time, or helps them confidently take the next step.