5 strategies for selecting, scaling digital health tech

Identify the problems that technology can help solve

In a keynote address, Sanchita Jain, vice president of digital innovation design and business strategy at Northwell Health, noted that several factors influence technology decisions. One of the most critical is identifying and understanding the problems that technology could help solve.

Often, healthcare leaders begin the technology selection process with the technology itself, either because they are approached by a vendor or they are hearing a great deal of buzz about a new tool, Jain explained. But this is not the right place to start.

"One of my favorite quotes by Russell Ackoff -- who was a pioneer in implementation science and system thinking -- he says that we fail most often because we solve the wrong problems than because we get the solution to the problem wrong," Jain said. "So, it is very important that we start with a problem mindset."

This means leaders should work closely with their staff who experience the daily workflows of the health system firsthand and can point out the operations where technology support would be beneficial. Jain suggests using observation, interviews and other approaches to understand the problem, including where it occurs within the context of the workflow and who it impacts. Then, leaders can begin to pinpoint technologies that could alleviate the issue.

Centralize technology evaluation

Digital health technology is evolving rapidly, with innovative new tools emerging in the market at a rapid pace. Amid this flurry of activity, decision-making about technology can become fragmented within health systems.

During a fireside chat, Ochsner Digital Medicine CEO Dan Shields suggested centralizing technology evaluation processes.

He shared that Ochsner Health has established an AI center of excellence to prevent situations where individual service lines incorporate technologies independently for various use cases, using different evaluation criteria.

Centralizing the technology evaluation process allows the health system to establish comprehensive criteria for vetting new tools and implementing them in ways that minimize security and clinical risk.

"These [tools] need to not only work, but they need to be working in a way that's going to get us to the right outcomes," Shields said. "And, I hate to say, it's a little wild, wild west right now in the AI world, but it is. So we need to make sure that that [the tools are] really heavily, really carefully vetted."

Decide whether to build or buy

A critical technology decision health system leaders must make is whether to build or adapt tools in-house or partner with an external vendor.

At Providence, this decision is made on a case-by-case basis, Ken Kooser, M.D., shared during a panel discussion. Kooser, medical director of remote patient monitoring (RPM) at Providence Virtual Care and Digital Health, noted that the health system offers telestroke and teleneurology programs using internal platforms and staff. 

However, Providence partnered with a third party for its RPM programs, primarily due to scalability challenges. Kooser said that the health system had several smaller RPM programs, but scaling those proved difficult.  

"There's a lot that goes into RPM," he explained. "You have to have devices. Something as simple as, logistically, how do you get the devices to the patients? How do you track the devices when the patients are enrolling? How do you get the devices back? Or do you ever get them back? How do you develop software so you can actually ingest all this data, make it meaningful?"

In order to scale RPM for chronic disease management across the health system, Providence partnered with an RPM vendor that had established tools and processes.

Invest in necessary upgrades to support new tech

Implementing and scaling the latest technologies may require significant upgrades to IT and facility infrastructure. Michelle Stansbury, vice president of IT and associate chief innovation officer at Houston Methodist, shared during a panel discussion that the health system spent about $18 million upgrading its facilities to support new technology.

Houston Methodist opened its fully integrated smart hospital in 2025, but leaders found that they wanted to implement some of the tools built into the new hospital in their older facilities as well. This meant spending millions to upgrade the older facilities, including the fiber and cables.

"Some people may go, wow, that was quite a bit, but we knew that if we didn't do that, we would not be able to carry those institutions forward in this new digital world that we're trying to live in," Stansbury said.

However, she also cautioned that it may not be possible to fully upgrade older facilities to support the latest tools.

"In our [smart hospital] facility, we have built-in tools where patients can control the temperature in their room, turn on and off the lights and everything, just by communicating with the Alexa device that is in there," she said. "That's not something that you can just build into your other facilities very easily. So, there are some things that we can't do there…[but] we now have the foundation to be able to carry us forward."

Understand local healthcare infrastructure before scaling

To scale digital health solutions across facilities, and in some cases, across state lines, health system leaders must first understand the local context of each facility.

That's according to Khang Nguyen, M.D., chief medical officer for care navigation at The Permanente Federation.

Digital healthcare creates a "kind of borderless, no brick-and-mortar kind of world," he said during a panel discussion. "Which now turns into you needing to know where your patients are at, the environment they're in, what community services are available to them, the pharmacies where they can go to pick up their prescriptions, which labs they can go to, which ERs are available."

Not being able to direct patients to the appropriate place for prescriptions or labs can create a last-mile care problem, wherein the patient is unable to complete the last step in their digital care journey, jeopardizing their care and experience, he added.

To combat this challenge, health system leaders must consider local area operations and provide the needed information as part of the digital health workflow within each facility.

Nguyen shared that along their digital health journey, Kaiser Permanente leaders found that they needed to reconfigure clinician databases and resources to address new scenarios and environments as they expanded digital care models into new facilities.

Adopting a long-term vision early in the technology deployment process has helped the health system design digital health pilots with scalability in mind from the get-go, Nguyen noted.

Technology selection, deployment and scaling will continue to pose challenges as digital healthcare innovation advances at breakneck speed. But by following proven strategies and established processes, health system leaders can significantly mitigate pain points and facilitate a successful digital transformation.

Anuja Vaidya has covered the healthcare industry since 2012. She currently covers the virtual healthcare landscape, including telehealth, remote patient monitoring and digital therapeutics.