Curve your innovation
2025 delivered plenty of digital health plotlines, and this year’s Rock Health Innovation Maturity Curve piece highlights the trends that truly captured attention. Longevity stepped into a breakout role with bold ambitions for long-term preventive care, boosted by rising consumer interest in personalized health information. Innovators building AI mental health chatbots increasingly recognized the high stakes of real-world application with safer guardrails and clearer boundaries, in hopes of addressing the critical access gaps that catalyzed their genesis. “Health benefits 2.0” (what we’re calling the latest wave of alternative benefit solutions) also claimed the spotlight as affordability pressures pushed non-traditional benefit models like ICHRAs and alternative PBMs to the forefront. Our reflection on last year’s innovation areas revealed a mixed bag of momentum: next-gen wearables pushed forward to build deeper traction, while the digital twins category experienced growing pains and climate health innovation struggled to gain steam (despite climate-driven health risks growing harder to ignore).
Even as policy shifts continue to create uncertainty, teams across the ecosystem have remained focused on making progress that feels meaningful and durable—from refining the integration of new innovations into care delivery, to shaping AI tools that inspire trust. If you’re looking for early clues about what could influence 2026, check out Rock Health Advisory’s annual Innovation Curve piece.
Headlines
CMS Puts Digital Health Into Spotlight With ACCESS Model
The group chat is abuzz with new provider payment model for telehealth, wearables, and more Modern Healthcare
Populations And Health Domains Served By Direct-To-Consumer Companies
A new study assessing the growing DTC digital health landscape JMIR
The Creator Of An AI Therapy App Shut It Down After Deciding It’s Too Dangerous
Why Yara AI’s founder now thinks AI chatbots aren’t safe for mental health Fortune
Why First-Generation Mental Health Apps Cannot Ignore Next-Gen AI Chatbots
But still, demand for mental health support outstrips supply STAT
Recent Funding
- Paradigm Health nabs $78M to expand its biopharma-focused clinical research platform
- Artera, an agentic AI platform for patient communications, collects $65M
- Care navigation and planning solution Reema Health secures $19M
- Trial Library picks up $10M to improve patient recruitment and diversity in cancer clinical trials
- Empathy Technologies raises $7.6M for its peer-led sobriety app Sober Sidekick
- Metri Bio lands $5M for its biological modeling and precision treatment tool for endometriosis
- Radical Health, an AI-first oncology care support solution, launches with $5M