In announcing its deal to acquire Aetna, CVS Health President and CEO Larry J. Merlo promised that they will “remake the consumer health experience” by merging the analytics of Aetna with the human touch of CVS. The resulting business promises to “provide consumers with a better experience, reduced costs, and improved access to health care experts.”

The cost of healthcare has been steadily rising for the past decade. By any actuarial analysis, we’re at the dawn of a financial meltdown as the Baby Boomers reach that ripe age where their healthcare expenditures begin to soar.

Building apps in healthcare is different from developing them in other industries. From the reasons we do it to how we develop and get them in the hands of users, creating technology in healthcare is its own complicated beast.

Here are three reasons why healthcare technology is so different from other industries.

I had the pleasure of trying to fit in on a panel of health tech experts this week at the Digital Medtech Conference in San Francisco. The topic: Preparing for a Successful Digital Health Pilot. The panel was moderated by Tamara StClaire (former CIO of Xerox) and included Alexander Grunewald (Healthcare Innovation at J&J), Cory Kid (Founder of Catalia), and, for some reason, they invited me too. 

In a given day, how many canned sales emails do you receive? How many of those are either immediately re-routed, unopened, or moved to your trash folder? With the rise of services like GrowthHackers and Upwork, no e-mail account is safe from hungry business development reps trying to cast a wide enough net to hit their monthly numbers.

Donald Trump has made public his appointees for Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

Ladies and gentlemen, please acquaint yourselves with six-term Republican Congressman (GA), David Price, and high flying healthcare consultant, Seema Verma.

At Redox, we’re building a multi-sided network of health systems and healthcare technology vendors on a foundation of interoperability and ease of adoption. The value props for each side are simple but powerful: health systems get a single connection to cloud-based applications, eliminating redundant infrastructure costs and reducing the interface management headache, while applications get a single API to connect to that allows them to interoperate with dozens of systems being used at the hospitals and provider groups they sell to.

I had the pleasure of camping in the high desert Tuesday night as the rest of the world watched, one jaw-dropping state at a time, as Trump was elected president. In the morning I drove into town and turned on the radio to be shocked by the news, all at once. I began to race through the rhetoric of Trump's campaign, the policies he vowed to extinguish and the power he’ll have with a congress behind him: supreme court, trade policies, immigration, national security, social policy, healthcare—holy crap, he’s going to repeal Obamacare. As with much of his campaign promises, he vowed to remove legislation without a plan as to what would replace it. So what will Trumpcare look like?

The empowered patient is a dream of many healthcare technologists. Watch our co-founder Niko Skievaski outline how the work we are doing today to integrate enterprise digital health solutions is actually laying the groundwork for the future of consumer health.

1 in 11 people worldwide live with diabetes. That’s over 415 million people suffering from a life-threatening disease that is also the leading cause of cardiovascular disease, blindness, kidney failure, and lower-limb amputation. While decades of research and treatment have lead to enormous improvements in both prevention and treatment, the disease, which already represents 12% of the world’s health expenditure (~$673 billion!), is growing at a frightening rate. If advancements in prevention and efficiency gains in treatment aren’t made quickly, the world risks a staggering numbers of lives lost, as well as dire financial ramifications that could threaten the stability of countries worldwide.

Patient engagement.

Some would say it’s a myth. Attempts to increase patient involvement in managing their health have been hurled from every angle, but it seems that until they are faced with a life-threatening illness, chronic diseases, or a broken bone, patients just can't be bothered to truly and proactively care about their health.

Recently, I joined the Marketing team at Redox to help us digitally refine the way we grow who we are as a company and how we interact with our customers. I was immediately intrigued by how 20% of our all social traffic in 2016 came from our Facebook page... even though our current Facebook page is, to put it nicely, complete TRASH.