Healthcare platforms span a complex, interconnected landscape – and no taxonomy captures it perfectly. The domains below represent our working framework for organizing, planning, and publishing conversations about where platform innovation is reshaping (or should reshape) healthcare. We treat this as a living taxonomy, useful for orientation, not exhaustive. If you see gaps, disagree with how we’ve drawn the lines, or want to propose refinements – we would love your feedback.
Care Access — Platforms eliminating friction between patients and appropriate care through navigation, discovery, and intelligent routing. Encompasses digital front doors, symptom-to-service matching, appointment access, and the unbundling of gatekeeping functions that delay care or drive patients to high-cost settings by default.
Virtual Delivery — Remote care platforms decoupling clinical expertise from physical proximity across synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid modalities. Addresses the fundamental question of which services require in-person presence and which can be delivered at lower cost and greater convenience without quality degradation.
Home-Based Care — Platforms shifting care delivery from institutional settings to patient homes for acute, post-acute, and longitudinal management. Challenges the hospital-centric model by enabling hospital-at-home, home infusion, skilled nursing alternatives, and aging-in-place infrastructure that reduces institutional costs.
Clinical Workflow — Core operational systems clinicians use for documentation, ordering, communication, and care management within delivery settings. The domain where platform lock-in is most entrenched and where interoperability failures impose the greatest hidden tax on care delivery efficiency.
Care Coordination — Platforms enabling longitudinal patient management across settings, specialties, and transitions where fragmentation currently causes quality failures. Addresses the structural gap between episodic billing incentives and the continuous relationships patients with complex conditions actually need.
Price Transparency — Platforms making healthcare costs visible, comparable, and actionable for patients, employers, and purchasers. Directly challenges the opacity that enables price discrimination, surprise billing, and the disconnect between list prices, negotiated rates, and patient responsibility.
Data Infrastructure — Interoperability platforms, health information exchanges, and connectivity networks enabling data flow across organizational boundaries. The foundational layer where standards adoption (FHIR, TEFCA) either enables or constrains every other platform’s ability to deliver integrated experiences.
Patient Records — Consumer-controlled platforms enabling individuals to aggregate, own, and selectively share their longitudinal health information. Represents the power shift from institutional data hoarding toward patient data sovereignty and the portability that competitive markets require.
Clinical Intelligence — AI and decision-support platforms augmenting diagnosis, treatment selection, and clinical judgment at the point of care. Where algorithmic medicine either democratizes expertise to underserved settings or entrenches biases and liability ambiguity depending on implementation.
Operational Intelligence — Predictive analytics platforms for staffing, capacity, supply chain, and financial forecasting across healthcare organizations. The domain where waste reduction meets workforce optimization and where data-driven operations can eliminate inefficiencies invisible to traditional management.
Payment Innovation — Platforms enabling value-based arrangements, risk stratification, and alternative payment models that align provider incentives with outcomes. The infrastructure layer that determines whether value-based care rhetoric translates into actual incentive realignment or remains performative.
Administrative Automation — Platforms reducing friction in prior authorization, claims adjudication, denial management, and coverage determination. Targets the estimated $250B+ in annual administrative waste and the prior authorization burden that delays care and consumes clinical time.
Workforce Dynamics — Platforms addressing healthcare labor markets, staffing optimization, credentialing, and the structural factors driving burnout and attrition. Confronts the sustainability crisis where workforce shortages constrain care access regardless of financing or technology advances.
Clinical Education — Platforms for medical training, simulation, continuing education, and career development across the healthcare workforce pipeline. Addresses both the bottleneck of clinician supply and the lag between evidence evolution and practice adoption.
Pharmacy Economics — Platforms addressing drug pricing transparency, benefit manager accountability, specialty drug access, and fulfillment innovation. One of the most opaque domains where intermediary complexity obscures who captures margin and whether patients receive cost-effective therapies.
Diagnostic Access — Platforms for laboratory, imaging, and point-of-care testing with emphasis on accessibility, speed, and appropriate utilization. Includes the shift toward at-home and decentralized testing that could democratize early detection or fragment quality oversight.
Research Participation — Platforms democratizing clinical trial access, enabling decentralized research, and generating real-world evidence from diverse populations. Challenges the current model where trials concentrate in academic centers and exclude the populations most likely to use approved therapies.
Chronic Management — Platforms enabling ongoing disease monitoring, remote patient engagement, and behavioral support outside episodic clinical encounters. The domain where care delivery must shift from reactive to proactive and where patient engagement determines outcomes more than clinical intervention.
Behavioral Integration — Platforms addressing mental health access, substance use treatment, and the integration of behavioral and physical health historically siloed. Confronts the access crisis where demand vastly exceeds supply and where stigma and reimbursement failures perpetuate undertreatment.
Aging Services — Platforms supporting the demographic wave of seniors across care settings from independent living through end-of-life. Encompasses Medicare navigation, long-term care coordination, caregiver support, and the infrastructure for dignity in aging that current systems fail to provide.
Women’s Health — Platforms addressing reproductive, maternal, and menopause care across clinical and consumer contexts historically underinvested. Includes fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and the full lifespan of conditions where research gaps and care access failures compound.
Health Equity — Platforms explicitly addressing access disparities, social determinant integration, and underserved population needs. Challenges the default where platform innovation serves affluent urban markets while widening gaps for rural, low-income, and marginalized communities.
Employer Purchasing — Platforms enabling self-insured employers and benefits consultants to configure, evaluate, and optimize health benefits. The domain where purchaser leverage could drive system reform if fragmentation and information asymmetry weren’t weaponized against employer interests.
Payer Operations — Platforms for health plan administration, member experience, and the core infrastructure enabling coverage to function. Includes the tension between administrative efficiency and the coverage denial machinery that generates margin by obstructing care.
Provider Sustainability — Platforms addressing practice economics, independence preservation, and alternatives to consolidation-driven margin compression. Confronts the dynamic where independent practice becomes economically unviable and consolidation raises prices without improving quality.
Quality Transparency — Platforms for outcomes measurement, safety surveillance, and public reporting that enable informed choices by patients and purchasers. The domain where data infrastructure meets accountability and where opacity currently protects low performers from market consequences.
Fraud Reduction — Platforms detecting waste, abuse, and fraudulent billing patterns across payer and provider ecosystems. Addresses the estimated 3-10% of healthcare spending lost to fraud while navigating the tension between detection and false positive burden on legitimate providers.
Regulatory Innovation — Platforms supporting policy evolution, compliance automation, and advocacy infrastructure across healthcare stakeholders. Encompasses the mechanisms by which rules evolve and the tools enabling organizations to navigate regulatory complexity without captured consultants.
Supply Optimization — Platforms for medical device procurement, pharmaceutical distribution, and supply chain visibility across delivery organizations. Challenges the GPO and distributor oligopolies where pricing opacity and contracting complexity extract margin without adding value.
Consumer Activation — Platforms for preventive health, wellness engagement, and health literacy enabling individuals to make informed decisions. The domain where patient agency begins—upstream of clinical encounters and where behavior change could prevent the conditions that consume downstream spending.