I recently had a minor surgical procedure which, after several years away from day-to-day exposure to healthcare delivery, gave me a real-time opportunity to step back into the system. This time, not as an operator or board member, but as a patient.
And what struck me most was just how little has changed.
From the outside, it feels like healthcare has made significant progress in digital health. But from the patient’s perspective, the experience is still deeply fragmented.
The same information had to be provided multiple times, to the surgeon, the anaesthetist, and the hospital. Each operating within their own system, some paper-based, some digital - none connected.
There was no ability to share information across providers. Which meant everything was re-entered, repeatedly, in isolation.
That doesn’t just create friction, it creates risk.
Every manual re-entry introduces the potential for inconsistency, error, or omission. And importantly, there’s no system-level mechanism to identify or reconcile those discrepancies, it relies entirely on human detection.
All of this culminated on the day of surgery, where the entire journey was brought together in a large paper folder.
The only visible sign of “digital health” was a barcode wristband. In theory, it was designed to be scanned at each stage to provide real-time updates to my nominated contact. In practice, the scanning rarely happened. And when it did, the notifications didn’t follow.
So I defaulted to sending a WhatsApp message once I was ready to be collected. Simple. Effective. Entirely outside the system.
Now, I’m not sharing this to criticise any individual provider. The care I received was exceptional.
But the system they’re operating within is not, and that distinction matters.
What this experience reinforced for me is that the challenge in healthcare is not awareness, it’s not even capability. It’s execution across a fragmented ecosystem.
We are still operating in a model where multiple stakeholders, each with their own systems, incentives, and constraints, are trying to deliver a seamless experience without shared infrastructure.
And that’s incredibly hard to solve.
There’s a well-known quote from Bill Gates that we tend to overestimate what can be achieved in one year and underestimate what can be achieved in ten.
Healthcare feels like the inverse.
We’ve spent the last decade talking about digital transformation, with relatively limited impact at the point of care. And yet, we continue to believe the next wave of change is just around the corner.
I hope that’s true. Because from where I sat, the gap between what is possible and what is being delivered is still significant.
The positive is that this remains an opportunity-rich environment. But it’s also a reminder that in complex, regulated systems, innovation is only as powerful as its ability to be implemented at scale.
That’s where the real work lies.
PS
Following on from last week’s newsletter on partnerships, we attended the 100-year celebration for our long-term lawyers at McCullough Robertson.
It was a great reminder that the most valuable partnerships aren’t transactional. They’re built over time, across multiple chapters, and grounded in shared trust and aligned ambition.
And just like in healthcare, the outcomes you achieve are often a reflection of how well your ecosystem works together.
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