Public Health Tech: The Future of Health Tech You Never Heard Of

The founders of P2Health Ventures believe the truly transformative opportunity in healthcare is in addressing the social, physical, political, and economic situation of each person—the social determinants of health.

Digital Health has experienced a glorious boom in the last decade and is expected to reach $379.3 Billion by 2024 with 25% of the growth occurring between 2016 and 2024. Patient management can now be done on user-friendly platforms; physicians can remotely monitor their patients with mobile devices and telemedicine; and personal trackers and genetic testing are allowing patients easier access to their own health data. Clearly, we understand the kind of power technology has on improving the delivery of care and management of disease.

But what Public Health professionals have known for decades and what Healthcare is now catching onto, is that the real story behind who is healthy and who is not has little or nothing to do with the doctor’s office at all—the real story starts in the place you lay your head (if you have a place to lay it at all). The bigger picture and, therefore, the truly transformative opportunity is in the social, physical, political, and economic situation of each person—the social determinants of health. Leveraging tech for this more comprehensive approach to health is what we are calling Public Health Tech.

Public Health Tech, as we define it, is any tech product or tech-enabled service that prevents the onset of disease or addresses the needs of medically vulnerable populations. It is a subset of digital health and sits at the intersection of Public Health and Tech. In 2016, my co-founder Vanessa Mason and I founded P2Health Ventures, the first venture fund supporting Public Health Tech companies. We invest in early-stage startups innovating solutions for population and/or preventative health...