The Rise of “Health IT”
Highlights:
- Health IT continues to grow rapidly, at 29% more search interest than its counterparts on average over the past 20 years
- The use of digital health is gradually increasing, with the most noticeable incline in media
Health tech, health IT, and digital health — are they interchangeable terms for our sector? Which one is the standard term? The data points toward health IT.
Although at one point health technology was in the lead, the term has since seen a slow, steady decline. Health technology has been around in some form since well before the 1960s. The term got a boost when “health technology assessment” (HTA), a method of analyzing risks and benefits of health tech application, was first coined in 1967 by the U.S. Congress. The momentum only built with the creation of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in the 1970s.
Coined by Seth Frank in the year 2000, digital health has grown into a diverse technology sector that far exceeds its initial meaning of “leveraging the internet to improve medical content, connectivity, and commerce.” Popularized by companies like WellDoc and the legendary incubator Rock Health, the term has seen a subtle but consistent increase in search volume.
Even considering the successes of these terms, neither has seen the astronomical growth that health IT has over the past decade. So when did this growth begin? In 2004, President George W. Bush developed the Office of the National Coordinator for HIT (ONC) and gave a State of the Union Address that some acknowledge to be the inception of the health IT revolution. The term started gaining significant traction around 2009 (see the spike?), the same year President Barack Obama signed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, introducing incentives to promote the widespread implementation of health information technology. These bold moves along with the ongoing innovations in the health IT space have created a powerful, industry-wide ripple effect that has not slowed down.
While health IT has a strong lead for search engine queries, our research revealed that in the media realm, digital health has started to catch up and even surpass health IT over the past year. At Uncommon Bold, we’ve certainly recognized the uptick in headlines announcing recent funding rounds and mergers at leading digital health companies. We see this as a potential signal that reporters are pushing digital health to be the more popular term in the future. With the rise of generative AI and the COVID pandemic’s impact on virtual care, which term do you think will come out on top?
