Hi, I'm Hannah and welcome to the A16Z podcast. Our biofund team often wonders if one day in the

future we might be shocked that we once relied only on something as backwards and often toxic

as pills for diseases like diabetes, depression, PTSD. So then what's the alternative? Could it be

digital therapeutics? This episode on Digital Health includes Omada Health CEO Sean Duffy, A16Z partner Vijay Pande, and is moderated by our own Malinka Wallaliate. Maybe we'll start with what is digital health? It's a pretty overuse term. It means different things for different people. So when people say it, what do we mean? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. If you look at what

software that had health care implications was called before, it was usually some amalgam of

e-health or M-health or health IT. And I think at large, software entrepreneurs started to latch

onto digital health because it felt fresher, frankly. It captured more.

Well, especially there was, there's something different than what we were talking about before.

And so that's why we needed a term.

Most of the time people think of digital health where it's software driving, right?

Software is leading the strategy, not a secondary, right?

That's really the next generation of software in healthcare where software has to be a solution to make the

big change versus kind of a second order of operations to make something real. Yeah, the way I see

it especially is that software allows us to do something new and at scale. What's a good example

of that? I think there's a whole host of companies that are kind of capitalizing on this

next era of how software can empower outcomes in a whole host of new ways. We're really shooting to

deliver a clinical outcome through software. You can think about the traditional breakdown for how

we think about healthcare as being DX and RX. And so the RX here are digital therapeutics, but there's also, in a sense,

digital diagnostics, the ability to be able to use machine learning in other areas to really

propel diagnostics in new ways as well.

And digital adjuncts, where it's digital is a complement to something that could be a, you know,

a drug.

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