Patients can schedule dinner online in ten seconds. Getting a follow-up appointment at most health systems still takes weeks. That gap is ridiculous.
The observation came out of the same CEO summit I've been writing about this month, three sessions, three angles on where healthcare is actually headed. If you want the operator's view on incentive design, that's a separate piece. This one is about the customer.
What Changed Post-COVID
John D'Angelo, CEO of Northwell Health, described a shift in how patients see themselves: they've become "the day-to-day CEO of their own health." Wearables and personal health data gave people direct access to information they used to get only from a provider, and that access changed the expectation permanently.
Amy Perry, CEO of Banner Health, named why the industry has struggled to keep up: "We in healthcare love safety. We love control. We love our guidelines." Good instincts for clinical decisions, and the wrong instincts for meeting a consumer who now expects the same convenience from a hospital system that they get from everything else in their life.
The Wearables Gap
The gap between what patients think a wearable is telling them and what it's actually capable of telling them is wider than most people assume. Consumer-grade blood pressure and sleep tracking still lag meaningfully behind FDA-approved clinical devices. For a general population, that gap is an inconvenience. For a high-risk patient, someone with heart failure who's likely to be readmitted, relying on the wrong device is a real clinical liability.
Nobody on the panel dismissed wearables. The consumer wearables market is projected to become a multi-trillion dollar industry, and the systems that ignore it are ceding ground they can't easily win back. The payment question is still unresolved: under a value-based or capitated model, a health system has a direct financial reason to pay for a wearable if it keeps a patient out of the hospital. Under fee-for-service, that same investment has no obvious home on anyone's balance sheet.
Who's Exploiting the Gap
New entrants aren't waiting for that question to get answered. Whole-body imaging companies have built entire verticals faster than traditional providers could respond. Wearable companies now offer 24/7 virtual primary care, moving directly into territory that used to belong exclusively to health systems.
Joseph Cacchione, MD, Chairman, CEO & President of Jefferson, described them as operating "on the edges" of the system: fast, narrow, and useful at the margins, but not built for the harder work of whole-person, whole-community health, especially for populations that don't look like the profitable ones these entrants are chasing.
What This Means for Health-Tech and Healthcare Companies
Consumer expectations already moved. The industry hasn't caught up, and the incumbents admit it openly.
The instructive part isn't the accuracy gap in the device itself, but the integration gap. A new entrant can win a narrow, high-margin niche quickly, but very few are positioned to solve for the whole patient, especially the parts of the population that aren't retail-friendly. That's exactly where an established company has room to compete, if it's honest about which side of that gap it's actually building for.
Three questions to consider:
Is the product built for the consumer expectation that already exists, or the one the industry wishes still existed?
Where does the offering sit: solving a narrow, high-margin problem well, or solving the harder whole-person problem incumbents can't reach?
What happens to the roadmap once a health system decides to build or buy the same convenience internally?
If you're navigating this kind of positioning question for a portfolio company or a health-tech business, I'd welcome a conversation about what's worked.
Second in a three-part series from the same summit. Paper one looks at the incentive structures underneath this. Paper three looks at what it means for the people being trained to deliver care inside it.