The healthcare industry is undergoing a radical transformation towards digitalization. Healthtech startups are springing up everywhere, raking in billions in financing to disrupt the current processes and business models. Most of these startups are using the platform business model to grow quickly and create value for multiple customer segments.
A platform business connects consumers and producers and allows them to interact and transact with one another. Platforms generate value because they provide possibilities for direct interaction on a massive scale. The world’s most valuable companies (Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft) exploit the platform’s business models.
Successful platforms in other industries, such as ridesharing, e-commerce, and social media, raise the question: can the winning strategy for the different tech sectors be successful in health? Is there room for a “super app” that easily and conveniently links patients, doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, insurers, and others?
Current State of HealthTech Platforms
Healthtech platforms are still in their early days but have seen rapid adoption, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. These custom healthcare software development platforms fall into a few categories:
Telehealth Platforms
Telehealth platforms like Teladoc, Amwell, and Doctor on Demand provide virtual urgent care, behavioral health, and other medical visits. These platforms enable patients to access doctors through phone or video from anywhere conveniently.
The telehealth market was estimated at $123.26 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 24.68% from 2025 to 2030. Most major health insurers have added telehealth benefits for members.
Still, telehealth platforms remain fragmented and focused on specific use cases, such as urgent care. No dominant “super app” has emerged.
Health System Patient Engagement Platforms
Many hospital systems have rolled out their web/mobile platforms, hoping to involve patients in telehealth visits, appointment scheduling, bill pay, access to health records, and other services.
For example, the Providence Health app lets patients manage healthcare across all Providence hospitals and clinics in 7 states. Still, these health system platforms face challenges in getting consumers to use their platform exclusively across fragmented care journeys.
Pharmacy Benefit Management Platforms
Pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) platforms like CVS Caremark, ExpressScripts, and OptumRx process over $500 billion in prescription drug spending annually. These platforms connect health plans and self-insured employers with consumers and pharmacies.
While PBM platforms see impressive transaction volumes, their models face controversy around transparency and drug pricing. This limits their ability to expand into a broader healthcare platform.
Health Insurance Marketplace Platforms
Public health insurance exchanges like Healthcare.gov and private marketplaces like GetInsured and eHealth provide platforms connecting consumers to health plans. However, these platforms historically had narrow application periods and focused functionality.
Most remain insurance and financial transaction platforms rather than broader wellness and care coordination platforms.
Patient Health Record Platforms
Electronic health records (EHRs) digitized patient medical records and represented an initial health tech beachhead. However, these EHR platforms like Epic and Cerner focus on hospital and health system users rather than patient engagement.
A few personal health record platforms, like Apple Health and OneRecord, allow patients to aggregate records across providers. However, adoption has been muted without always-on use cases beyond simple record storage.
Digital Health Innovation Platforms
Finally, startups like Xealth, Redox, TrueVault, and 1upHealth provide digital health innovation platforms. These build connections between patient apps, medical devices, wearables, EHRs, and other systems.
However, these remain “picks and shovels” focused on enabling other health apps rather than owning the consumer experience. They allow innovation but don’t provide an integrated platform experience.
No Clear Super App Leader
As we survey the market, we see that health tech platforms show tremendous promise. Providers, payers, and consumers have flocked to apps that provide convenient telehealth visits, prescription management, medical record access, and other functionality.
However, no dominant super app has yet emerged across an integrated health journey. The market remains fragmented across point solutions focused on specific use cases or customer segments.
Can Medical Software Become the Next Super App?
Super apps provide broad, integrated platform experiences, locking in users across daily activities like conversation, commerce, entertainment, and more. Could a single health app provide this same always-on utility for healthcare needs?
There is an incredible opportunity to streamline the consumer health journey by connecting vital but siloed healthcare platform functionality. However, building a truly integrated medical super app presents significant challenges.
Opportunities
A healthcare super app platform could provide many benefits:
- Convenience for patients managing healthcare through a single app
- Increased preventive care and medication adherence
- Streamlined transitions between care settings
- Data portability enables personalized care recommendations
- Integrated health records reduce duplicate tests
- Lower administrative costs for payers and providers
Early telehealth adoption shows that convenience drives patient platform engagement. An integrated app experience could build on this insight, enabling superior access, outcomes, and lower costs.
Additionally, super apps in other industries demonstrate the power of an integrated platform model. Single platforms like WeChat and Alipay handle a dominant share of commerce and payments in China by providing a broad set of tightly integrated financial services.
A US healthcare super app could inspire similar loyalty by becoming the default platform for healthcare needs. This hints at the total addressable market such an app could reach.
Challenges
However, the path to developing a healthcare super app faces imposing barriers:
Fragmented Industry
Healthcare has notoriously fragmented data, regulations, workflows, stakeholders, and patient experiences. Integrating these complex, disconnected systems into a single platform presents enormous technical and organizational challenges.
Incumbents Resisting Disruption
Established healthcare enterprises may resist an integrated platform that shifts power, profits, and data access away from them toward consumers and disruptors. The integrated platform model threatens intermediaries in pharmaceutical supply chains, health insurance, and other areas.
Evolving Regulations
Navigating healthcare’s regulatory environment across privacy, data formats, billing practices, and care models requires significant legal, compliance, and policy expertise. Regulations continue evolving, introducing uncertainty for health platforms.
Building Trust
Healthcare requires high trust, given the sensitivity of personal health data. Cybersecurity threats continue growing, with medical identity theft emerging as a key risk. Platforms must provide ironclad data privacy and security to earn patient trust.
Achieving Critical Mass
Platform business models rely on strong network effects. A one-sided consumer app won’t gain enough usage. To reach scale, all key industry players need representation. Platforms must meticulously curate participation across each segment of an industry value chain.
Without critical mass on both the consumer and producer sides, the platform cannot provide enough value.
These challenges suggest that healthcare may not follow the rapid rise of super apps in other industries. However, a platform could gain footholds by starting narrowly and unifying fragmented systems piece by piece.
A potentially viable playbook involves beginning with a strong consumer value proposition before expanding across the healthcare ecosystem. This requires patience but can ultimately create a broad, integrated platform.
Concluding Thoughts
In summary, the rapid advancement of health tech innovation continues. Patient and provider digital adoption opens opportunities for platforms streamlining healthcare journeys.
However, rather than expecting a sudden disruption of a healthcare super app, incremental integration of workflows, records, and systems seems more realistic in such a complex, regulated industry.
Still, the promise remains compelling. A broad, unified health platform could alleviate countless pain points for patients, providers, payers, and health systems. Even partial solutions integrating fragments of the health journey provide value.
Given the massive scale of healthcare spending and frustration with status quo inefficiencies, investor and entrepreneur appetite remains high. The healthcare super app may not arrive as fast as other industries, but activity suggests the groundwork is being laid.
Prepare for cutthroat competition between platforms as innovators dig for loopholes. Although the eventual winning platform model is not yet clear, it feels inevitable that broad platforms with integrated health will gradually emerge.
Software innovation is striving to create healthcare’s super app via patient-centric design and consistent incentives across health industry stakeholders. If technical and business model challenges could be overcome, improving outcomes and reducing costs would be a tremendous value proposition.
Look out for ongoing work of stitching together, piecemeal, health data, systems, and processes using platforms. This consistent momentum suggests the emergence of multifunctional health apps – even if a one-off “super app” is still many years away. Consumers have come to expect on-demand healthcare at the same convenience they have been accustomed to receiving from other on-demand platform services.
Software innovation may eventually change the way we manage and provide care, bringing medicine into the platform age, one integration at a time.
