Giving Compass' Take:

• Promoting health positive technology is possible, but requires a shift in how we view general health and wellness apps that bolster these behaviors. 

• How can donors better support health-positive technology? What are the challenges in making the technology sector align with societal goals? 

• Read how VR and AR could transform the health sector.

Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, it had become hard to be healthy in the United States. Healthier choices are often more expensive, less accessible, and less convenient: Not only are opportunities for health not evenly distributed, but almost every major health indicator shows big differences based on income. We’re all swimming upstream, but those with resources can more easily overcome these currents: They can afford healthier foods, live in walkable communities, purchase gym memberships, or can afford the time to pursue healthier choices instead of work.

When we leave the task of staying healthy to individuals, and when individual efforts fail, the medical system must intervene, late, and at great expense. As a society, therefore, we have a shared interest in making health less of a struggle. All sectors need to be deeply engaged in promoting health to improve health outcomes, but the technology sector’s ubiquity makes it a perfect place to direct individuals toward more healthy choices and behaviors. Innovation focused on health-positive technologies could have an outsized impact: What if health-positive were the default option rather than a suggestion?

This pervasiveness creates opportunities to address health at a societal scale by consciously embedding health and well-being as explicit goals for the design of the products and services that touch our everyday lives in these many ways.

Aligning the technology sector with a societal goal of greater health and well-being entails a number of shifts in thinking. The most fundamental is understanding health not as a vertical market segment, but as a horizontal value: In addition to developing a line of health products or services, health should be expressed across a company’s full portfolio of products and services.

Read the full article about health positive technology by Sara Singer, Stephen Downs, Grace Ann Joseph, Neha Chaudhary, MD, Christopher Gardner, Nina Hersher, Kelsey P. Mellard, Norma Padrón, PhD, & Yennie Solheim at Stanford Social Innovation Review.