Why 'digital health' is the wrong frame

The phrase "digital health" has always bothered me. Not because digitising healthcare is wrong — it isn't. But because the framing reveals how most people think about the problem.

"Digital health" treats technology as an adjective. Something you bolt onto healthcare. A modifier. The assumption is that healthcare works, it just needs to be more digital.

But the system doesn't work. The infrastructure underneath — the way data flows between providers, the way clinical pathways fragment at every handoff, the way patient records exist as isolated snapshots rather than continuous threads — that infrastructure was never designed for continuity. It was designed for episodes.

Adding "digital" to a broken system gives you a faster broken system.

Healthcare infrastructure. Not digital health, not health tech, not medtech. Infrastructure.

Infrastructure implies something underneath. Something load-bearing. Something designed to serve what sits above it without drawing attention to itself. Good infrastructure disappears — you only notice it when it fails.

The question isn't "how do we digitise healthcare?" The question is "what infrastructure does continuity of care actually require?" and then building that, with whatever technology serves the answer.

Sometimes that's software. Sometimes it's a simpler form. Sometimes it's removing a step rather than adding a feature. The technology is incidental. The infrastructure is the point.