Physician here. SV Tech will win because it is customer centric. Traditional Healthcare tech is enterprise centric - the precept on which they base their strategies is 'economies of scale'. People are not widgets. Economies of scale (aka corporate controlled healthcare) do not apply. As institutions grow larger, eddy currents of dominance develop - fiefdoms that compete for control, power and share of the budget. There are so many layers of middle management that the most popular complaint is that everyone is a manager. Our hospital actually has 5x as many employees as there are patients in it. I know of no other industry where this skewed statistic exists. Can you imagine an airliner with twice as many stewards as passengers? Perhaps the legal profession is an exception, where you have so many bodies tending to a trial. In healthcare, patients are lost in this machine and the cacophony of voices speaking to them is a disservice. Perhaps tho in this era of the consumer age, some patients conflate quantity with quality and might actually feel 'more is better'. If healthcare is delivered through a watch on your wrist instead of an army of servants, the layperson might be able to focus his/her understanding on the single voice their device has.
The other secret weapon of SV is that it promises to get people to open up their pocketbooks to actually pay for their own healthcare. Government will adore them for that. If you think that will never happen, just stop and think for a minute. People shell out hundreds of dollars a year for the privilege of being tracked and being advertising targets. All because the mobile device caters to their impulse for 'connectedness'. Imagine if this device promised a longer life, better sex, better sleep, less disease. And it showed you with colorful cartoon graphs how much better you were every time you asked it. Forget the fact that many of these parameters are only relevant to the big picture. Statistics apply to populations and any attempt to assign characteristics from population studies to a given individual carry uncertainty. They never tell you how big the error bars are, do they? Certainly a better diet and more exercise confer health benefits. But trying to 'gamify' this data will just add a cognitive burden and most likely will lead to more popular misconceptions and misinterpretations. Or perhaps it will be a new social nexus?When I am in a Starbux or Panera, there are always a few conversations my ears cannot avoid as people share their health problems over a sandwich and a coffee. And I cannot help laughing at how ironic the whole HIPAA thing is.
Ultimately I fear that tech will foster the return of snake oil salesmen, on a massive scale. We are in a deregulation mania now and I think healthcare will soon fall under Trump's razor and he will encourage SVTech to make their move.