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When digital health companies Livongo and Teladoc announced their $38 billion merger earlier this month, there was a predictable gushing of praise for the deal and a sense of coming-of-age for digital health startups in general. "Perfect merger," "huge leap forward for digital health," were some of the phrases used to describe the merger. Both companies had reached a certain scale, had had successful IPOs, and were positioned very well in the aftermath of the pandemic to take advantage of the shift to virtual care.
In my recently published book Healthcare Digital Transformation (co-authored with Ed Marx), we discuss the fundamental drivers of digital transformation today in healthcare, namely:
* the pandemic’s impact on the shift to virtual care
* the accelerated adoption telehealth and remote monitoring technologies
* the emergence of non-traditional players that are getting aggressively into the primary care space.
Digital transformation time horizons have shrunk from years to months for health systems in the wake of the pandemic. In an article I published in this column just before the announcement of what is now commonly referred to as the “Teladongo” deal (that awful portmanteau), I point out that several structural issues must be overcome before telehealth adoption can be more widespread. The initial scramble to activate and operate a predominantly virtual care model in the immediate wake of the pandemic must give way to an assessment of the transformation efforts required to shift towards virtual care, the technology choices needed to sustain them, and the organization models necessary to execute them effectively....