After working in healthtech for over a decade, I’ve seen more than a hundred developers make the same mistake.

They treat healthtech like any other tech product.

Build features. Scale fast. Automate everything. Repeat.

But healthtech should not be built like a tech product. Because it isn’t one.

It’s not an everyday gadget you use for convenience or a platform you explore in your downtime. It’s far more layered than that. It’s an ecosystem. One that’s rooted in urgency, in humanity, in personal decisions that often come with emotional, physical, and even life-altering consequences.

And this is the part most developers miss.

The Myth of the “Tech Product” Mindset

If you come from a purely tech background, you’re trained to solve problems logically. You build features. You optimise performance. You think in terms of clean user flows, system architecture, and minimal downtime.

But in healthcare, logic isn’t the only thing. There’s vulnerability. There’s fear. Some patients don’t know the right words to describe what they’re feeling. Families making decisions in high-stress moments. Frontline staff juggling ten things at once while trying to show empathy.

This isn’t an industry where you can move fast and break things. Because in healthtech, what you break might be trust. Or worse.

The Chapter You Thought You Could Skip

Let me give you an analogy.

Healthtech is like that one chapter you skip while studying, thinking, “This won’t be in the exam.” Maybe it’s too complex, maybe it feels irrelevant at the time, or maybe it’s just too far away from your current focus.

Until the day of the test, and it turns out that the chapter is the whole paper.

That’s what it’s like when you realise the healthcare system is built on foundations you didn’t take the time to understand: care pathways, cultural norms, regulatory nuance, and the real-life behaviour of patients and clinicians.

You can’t retrofit empathy into your product later. It has to be part of the foundation.

Why Features Aren’t Enough

Here’s the thing about developers: they love features. The more, the better. It’s easy to think adding one more function, one more dashboard, or one more button will solve the problem.

But that’s not how it works.

The best healthcare systems don’t win because they offer the most features. They win because they’re intuitive. Trusted. Familiar. Designed with a deep understanding of the people using them.

Developers often forget this: there’s always a human at the other end.

Maybe it’s a nurse toggling through a cluttered UI during a night shift. Or a 60-year-old patient struggling to book a virtual consultation. Or a community health worker in a rural area with limited connectivity.

If your system can’t adapt to their world, then it doesn’t matter how advanced it is.

What Healthtech Is Truly About

At its core, healthtech is empathy powered by intelligence.

It’s not just about the tech stack. It’s about asking the right questions:

• What part of the system have we ignored for too long?
• What decisions are people making when no one is watching?
• What emotional labour happens silently behind the scenes?

Building in this space requires a shift in mindset. You have to zoom out from your screen and zoom in on people.

The startups that will lead this space aren’t necessarily the flashiest or most viral. They’ll be the ones that truly understand:

• What must be localised?
• What can’t be automated?
• What’s worth simplifying and what’s too complex to touch without care?

They’ll be the ones who remember that healthcare is a relationship, not just a transaction.

What We’ve Forgotten Along the Way

Somewhere along the path of disruption and digital transformation, we forgot to ask: How does this feel for the person using it?

We overlooked cultural contexts.

We dismissed local practices.

We assumed more data meant better care.

But technology doesn’t create empathy. People do. Technology should support them, not replace them.

So when we build for healthtech, we have to do more than what technology did. We have to observe, to listen, to immerse ourselves in the very real challenges of the people we aim to serve.

Because at the end of the day, healthtech only works when it puts the “health” before the “tech.”

As we continue to build, scale, and dream in the healthtech space, here’s a question worth asking:

What part of the system have we ignored for too long, and what would it take to truly see it again?

Let’s start there.