The New Tech Stack for Virtual-First Care - Andreessen Horowitz⁠↗

The true promise of digital health is the delivery of high-quality care at a fraction of the cost, and at dramatically higher scale than incumbents—by using modern tech and AI to do what historically has been done through human labor or poorly functioning IT products. A risk to this promise is that every digital health company ends up allocating all of its cost savings to rebuilding the same components of their operating systems over and over again from scratch, across their separate walled gardens.

We’re now at a tipping point where the digital health market is large enough, and growing quickly enough, to drive demand for companies that serve as the “new tech stack for virtual-first care”. In the same way that Plaid abstracted out entire layers of infrastructure to dramatically reduce the cost and and time to stand up a new fintech business, these healthtech companies are allowing digital health startups to accelerate their time-to-market, and shift their focus on building core infrastructure to delivering game-changing care to patients.