Digital health lessons across industries

I recently attended SXSW in Sydney — a festival that brings together leaders from business, technology and the creative industries for a week of ideas, innovation and inspiration. After three consecutive years, I’ve seen a lot of cool tech and met loads of brilliant people operating across various industries and disciplines.

It’s this exposure to other sectors that makes me reflect on how digital health can adapt lessons from industries that have already solved challenges of safety, trust, engagement and scale. Health care often treats itself as a world apart. Its complexity, regulation and stakes make it feel unique. But strip away the clinical context and these challenges are not exclusive to health care.

Take aviation. Pilots and airlines face stakes as high as any surgeon or hospital. Their answer has been systems thinking. Checklists, black box data and near-miss reporting reduce human error and build cultures where mistakes become learning opportunities. Digital health has yet to embrace this level of rigour in usability, error reporting or simulation-based training for clinicians and patients alike.

Gaming might seem like the opposite of health care, yet its lessons are powerful. Engagement is designed, not accidental. Adaptive difficulty keeps players hooked without pushing them away. Storytelling creates emotional connection. Social mechanics like leaderboards and guilds sustain community and accountability. These are not gimmicks. They are methods for keeping people engaged with hard tasks. Digital health often struggles with adherence, but games show how to make complex, repetitive behaviours both fun and motivating.

Finance offers lessons in trust and transparency. People share their most sensitive financial data daily, not because they love banks, but because systems feel secure, trackable and convenient. Open banking demonstrates what happens when interoperability standards are enforced: ecosystems flourish. Generally speaking, health care continues to struggle with fragmented records, clunky access and weak audit trails. Patients will not trust digital health until it gives them the same visibility and control they expect from online banking.

The automotive industry shows how preventive monitoring and rigorous safety validation can save lives. Modern cars are rolling networks of sensors designed to detect issues before breakdowns. When failures occur, recall processes are transparent and systematic. Compare that to opaque digital health tools where usability flaws or data errors often stay hidden until they cause harm.

Retail and hospitality provide reminders that experience matters. People return to services not just because they work, but because they feel seamless and human. Anticipatory service in hotels (knowing what you need before you ask) offers a vision for proactive health. Loyalty programs and personalised recommendations show how to sustain long-term engagement. Digital health often underestimates the emotional side of design, yet it is often the difference between adoption and abandonment.

Logistics, education, construction and sports each offer their own lessons: precision tracking, personalisation, collaborative planning and coaching for long-term behaviour change. None of these are foreign to health care — they are just applied with more consistency and discipline in other industries.

Those of us working in digital health don’t need to reinvent everything in isolation. The industries that have already cracked engagement, safety and trust provide blueprints we can adapt. The challenge is less about invention and more about adopting proven approaches from the world beyond health care’s walls.

*Josh Farrington is CEO of Solara Health.

Top image credit: iStock.com/Jacob Wackerhausen