WellTech reframes people not as passive recipients of care but as active partners, writes Dr Greg Burch, co-founder of the Digital Health Passport
Healthcare is at a pivotal inflection point. For decades, MedTech has focused on diagnosing, treating, and managing disease.
Its value has been measured by clinical outcomes in hospital wards, operating theatres, and diagnostic labs.
But a seismic shift is underway: healthcare is moving from disease-centred care to wellbeing-centred support, and with it, the rise of a new category of innovation – WellTech.
This transition doesn’t simply expand the scope of MedTech; it fundamentally reframes what health technology means, how value is created, and who participates in managing health.
Conditions such as asthma, diabetes, epilepsy and sickle cell disease don’t fit neatly into a ‘diagnose and discharge’ model
For decades, healthcare technology has been built around moments of crisis. You get ill. You see a clinician. A system records what happened.
That model has delivered extraordinary advances, but it was never designed for the world we are living in now.
Many of today’s biggest health challenges are long-term, fluctuating and deeply embedded in everyday life.
Conditions such as asthma, diabetes, epilepsy and sickle cell disease don’t fit neatly into a ‘diagnose and discharge’ model. They require continuity, context and trust, not just episodic intervention.
Furthermore, the overlap with mental health is undeniable. All long-term conditions can negatively affect mental health – and when mental health is affected managing a condition becomes harder. A vicious circle can develop.
The role of WellTech
This is where WellTech comes into focus. WellTech is not about replacing clinical care or diminishing the role of professionals.
It is about extending healthcare beyond the clinic and into the reality of people’s lives. Rather than concentrating solely on treatment, WellTech emphasises prevention and early intervention, self-management and confidence, day-to-day decision-making, and sharing the right information at the right time with the right people.
It recognises a simple truth: health does not happen in appointments; it happens between them. We have to focus on ‘people’ not ‘patients’.
WellTech recognises a simple truth: health does not happen in appointments; it happens between them
One of the most persistent barriers to achieving this vision is fragmentation.
People living with long-term conditions are often expected to repeat their story again and again, carry paper letters or screenshots between services, remember medication changes and action plans, and advocate for themselves in moments of stress.
Clinicians, meanwhile, are working under intense time pressure with incomplete information and systems that rarely speak to one another.
The gap between what the system knows and what the person knows is not just inconvenient — it can directly affect safety, outcomes and confidence.
The Digital Health Passport
The Digital Health Passport offers a glimpse of how WellTech can help close that gap. At its heart is a simple but powerful idea: put people back at the centre of their own health information – and bring everything into one accessible place.
The passport is an app, available for free download, to support people with asthma and allergies. It aims to empower young people, particularly 13–25-year-olds, to carry validated, up-to-date health information with them, share it easily with clinicians, carers, schools or employers, and feel prepared rather than reactive.
Importantly, it is not about collecting data for data’s sake. It is about making health information useful, human and portable — something that supports real-world decision-making rather than sitting passively in a system.
Furthermore, we recognise the link between physical and mental health which is why we are partnered with Young Minds alongside charities focused on health conditions. Support for when you are well and when things are not so good.
The Digital Health Passport is about making health information useful, human and portable
This distinction matters, because one of the risks in the WellTech conversation is that it becomes overly focused on gadgets, sensors or consumer novelty.
Technology alone does not create wellbeing. WellTech only works when it is built with people, not just for them.
That means co-designing with patients, families and communities; working alongside clinicians and health systems; prioritising trust, accessibility and inclusion; and designing for the realities of daily life, not idealised use cases.
Perhaps the most profound shift WellTech represents is cultural. It reframes people not as passive recipients of care, but as active partners — experts in their own lived experience, supported by clinicians, technology and systems that work together.
This is the future health innovation must serve: fewer surprises, better conversations, earlier support and greater confidence. Care that fits around life, not the other way round.
The move from MedTech to WellTech is not a trend; it is a necessary evolution. Because the future of healthcare does not start with illness. It starts with wellbeing, understanding and trust.
Dr Greg Burch, is joint chief executive of Tiny Medical Apps and co-founder of the Digital Health Passport, which is part of the NHS Innovation Accelerator. The latest cohort of the NHS Innovation Accelerator will be announced on 25 March 2026 at Digital Health Rewired.
