The 50 Most Promising Digital Health Companies of 2023, Revealed

CB Insights has revealed the winners of the fifth annual Digital Health 50 (previously the Digital Health 150) — a list of the 50 most promising private digital health companies across the globe.

This week, CB Insights released a list of what it considers to be the 50 most promising digital health companies of 2023. The startups on the list are working to improve four main aspects of healthcare: personalization, efficiency, equity and accessibility. Lately, patients paying more out of pocket for care is impacting the digital transformation of healthcare, but the industry is about a decade behind retail and banking when it comes to digital transformation and customer engagement technologies. 

The Digital Health 50 is CB Insights’ annual ranking of the 50 most promising digital health startups in the world. This year’s winners are working on making healthcare AI safer, developing new drugs and therapies, bringing clinical trials to underserved populations, and more.

“I don’t think it’s going to be news to anybody that overall funding for global digital health has really fallen off. We’re currently at the lowest point we’ve been at for a while, which makes it interesting that these 50 digital health companies are really bucking that trend,” said Alex Lennox-Miller, lead analyst at CB Insights, in a webinar.

The main similarity between the 50 startups is that they have all raised money and demonstrated the value of their products in a challenging market. All the startups on the list are also “doing their best to create engaged, personalized and scalable experiences,” Lennox-Miller declared.

Tech novelty, market potential, and impact on the industry were taken into consideration

The 50 winners were chosen from over 10K companies, including applicants and nominees. They were selected based on several factors, including CB Insights datasets — covering R&D activity, Mosaic scores, business relationships, software buyer transcripts, investor profiles, news sentiment analysis, competitive landscape, and team strength — along with criteria such as tech novelty, market potential, and impact on the industry.

Companies on this list are creating instruments for clinicians, healthcare organizations, payers, and life sciences companies, the final goal being that more people have easier access to better, more innovative treatments, while paying for it and keeping track of documents becomes a more comprehensive process. Some companies are building the next generation of drug discovery platforms or re-envisioning how clinical trials are prepared, run, and accessed. Others are focused on tools for transforming surgery and helping patients prepare for procedures. Many are developing new ways to analyze data from monitoring devices or imaging, using AI to make quicker diagnoses and to help clinicians determine the right treatment for each patient.

CB Insights customers can access the entire Digital Health 50 list and interactive Expert Collection here. 

Personalization in healthcare is targeted medicine

Personalization in healthcare is much more than precision medicine, it is targeted medicine and a healthcare plan for each and every patient, made to help obtain the best possible outcome.

Companies like Navina and RadAI, for instance, generate personalized pre-visit planning documents and post-visit summaries for patients, as well as prepare documentation for providers for things like referrals and prior authorization requests.

Other companies, such as Violet and DexCare, apply personalization to patient outreach, by tailoring content to patients’ health history and current conditions, sending appointment reminders, through various communication solutions, such as text, email and mobile apps.

“With the increase in data interoperability with more refined analytics and especially now with the use of generative AI, personalization can really be done much more easily, much more at scale and can really be found in a number of different spaces,” Lennox-Miller explained.

Efficiency – or how to ensure a better workflow

Healthcare has been plagued by inefficiencies “for decades at least, possible centuries,” Lennox-Miller declared.

“The really interesting advance in how people are approaching productivity in healthcare is that now much more of these products are looking at how to supplement providers and how to supplement staff, rather than trying to replace them or trying to take over entire tasks,” he said.

Medivis and Proprio, to give only a couple of examples, are performing in the surgical intelligence space. They improve clinicians’ workflows by automating some of the procedure planning, assisting with documenting results and using synthetic imaging to reduce the amount of time clinicians spend in the imaging suite. Synthetic imaging means generating artificial images, from preexisting medical imaging data, to enhance diagnostic information or create specific visualizations to assist in medical interpretation.

Equity – how to better address the unique needs of various patient populations

An increasing number of healthcare startups are recognizing the importance of human variation within healthcare, according to Lennox-Miller. The industry is actually beginning to understand the providers need to really take into consideration the unique needs and circumstances of their diverse patient populations.

“Recognizing variation is important for achieving not just the best clinical results and the best patient experience, but in really ensuring that everybody is getting the best possible healthcare and feels that healthcare is accessible to them,” he explained.

Companies like MedeLoop, Paradigm and QuantHealth have designed tech to make clinical  trials more accessible, to make sure the pharma industry isn’t producing less effective therapies  for certain patient populations, Lennox-Miller pointed out. 

Other startups have made advances in the women’s health space, maternity clinic Oula and menopause-focused virtual clinic Midi Health being only two of them, born out of women’s frustrations with the traditional healthcare system. Virtual reality is used more and more across the healthcare system. Recent statistics show that more than 240 hospitals in the United States are using virtual reality to assist various health-related procedures and help patients visualize and understand their treatment plans.

Accessibility – more than convenience for patients

The healthcare industry has been trying to make care more convenient for people since the dawn of retail clinics. Being able to get help when needed, closer to home or from their own home is very important to patients, and care providers acknowledge that. Care coordination companies like Memora Health and Wellvana, but accessibility isn’t just about convenience, Lennox-Miller noted.

“These are tools about how we can make care happen sooner? How do we make sure that people are getting the right care and the appointments that they need so they aren’t going from doctor to doctor and from specialist to specialist waiting to get some kind of answer to what’s wrong with them? How do we make sure that care is coordinated correctly so that things are happening in a timely fashion and communication is going on?” he explained.

Miller also said the industry needs to ensure that data is quickly integrated into patient records, no matter where they received care. Thus, providers don’t have to scramble to find and gather faxes, scanned documents and physical records, making it harder for patients to receive timely care. An example of an interoperability focused start-up is Particle, a company working to connect providers, tech developers and other healthcare organizations to unified application programming interfaces (APIs) enabling authorized access to patients’ health records.