Building Digital Healthcare Ecosystems: The Future of Digital Health, 2040

From Episodic Visits to Continuous, Agent-orchestrated Care on Shared Trust/Data Rails

This study charts how digital health ecosystems are likely to form and scale through 2040 and what that implies for providers, payers, technology vendors, and retail/community partners. We define a digital health ecosystem as an interoperable platform that coordinates people, data, and decisions across home, retail, and hospital settings-secured by shared trust services for identity, consent, provenance, and security.

Using a simple segmentation-care journey (pre/at/post; lifelong prevention), technological capabilities (data and interoperability, AI/agents, experience, security and governance), and ecosystem actors (patients/caregivers, providers, payers, retail/community, public and tech partners)-the report describes a shift from episodic, place-based care to continuous, agent-supported services delivered near home. Key trends include AI-human convergence (digital doctor co-pilots), decentralization from hospitals to people, patient-managed data portability, and continuous evidence pipelines that connect care to payment.

Growth is propelled by maturing AI agents, cloud-edge platforms, interoperability mandates, longevity and multimorbidity, outcome-oriented economics, and cybersecurity becoming a buying requirement. Restraints to manage include regulatory and liability uncertainty, uneven digital maturity and human-technology integration, equity and access gaps, misaligned incentives, and rising cyber/model risks.

The study identifies high-potential opportunities and specifies what vendors must get right: platform trust, API/data liquidity, assurance and observability, outcome reporting, and ecosystem partnerships. A staged enabling-technologies roadmap (2024-2040) translates these findings into near-term pilots and scalable paths to 2040.