In a CIO article about the merger of digital health companies Livongo and Teladoc, Paddy Padmanabhan, founder and CEO of Damo Consulting, asks, “Are we in the midst of a broad-based restructuring of the digital healthcare sector?” 

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 of telehealth and remote monitoring technologies, the emergence of non-traditional players that are getting aggressively into the primary care space.

Read the full article on CIO.