Shafaat Choyon.
Essays · Health-Tech
Essays on health-tech and digital health.
I led marketing and corporate sales at Praava Health and then ran operations as COO of Laser Treat Group, both in Dhaka. These essays are about the business of digital health: what gets paid for, what scales, and why execution beats the pitch.
In this topic: The business of digital health When patients pay: cash and financing Access and delivery Medicines and supply Workforce and demographics Bangladesh's digital health
The business of digital health 7
AI scribes save 16 minutes a day, not an hour
The biggest study yet found AI scribes cut documentation by 16 minutes a day, and a 238-physician trial found one scribe worked and another did not move the needle. The gains sit with the minority who use them in most visits. Adoption is a change-management job.
Jan 15, 2027
Medicare now pays for outcomes, not apps
Since 5 July 2026, Medicare's ACCESS model has paid tech-enabled care teams $360 a year for an early cardio-kidney-metabolic patient, in full only if at least half their patients hit clinical targets. The winners will be the teams that keep patients, and Bangladesh's blood pressure program shows why.
Jan 11, 2027
Epic turned the EHR into an agent factory
Epic's no-code Agent Factory lets health systems build their own AI agents on top of 120 ready-made AI features, with wide release in 2027. When the record becomes the factory, point solutions get squeezed, and integration becomes the strategy.
Jan 7, 2027
$11.1B and no IPOs: digital health is now an execution business
US digital health startups raised $11.1B in the first nine months of 2026, in fewer and bigger deals, and nobody has listed on a stock market since August 2025. Bangladesh's health operators never had an exit to count on. Their playbook is now everyone's.
Dec 31, 2026
Zero Digital Health IPOs in Six Months: the Exit Bar Just Changed
Zero digital health IPOs landed in H1 2026. Hinge Health's stock doubled anyway, because it cleared the Rule of 40. Here's what changed.
Aug 19, 2026
The trust cold-start in two-sided health platforms
Every platform faces the same first problem: nobody comes because nobody's there. In health it's worse: the currency isn't supply and demand, it's trust.
Aug 8, 2026
The middle is disappearing: digital health's $4B quarter
Digital health raised $4B last quarter and 12 companies took 59%. What that concentration and "AI as table stakes" mean for everyone who isn't a megadeal.
Jul 23, 2026When patients pay: cash and financing 6
The $149 pill: GLP-1s become a subscription business
Weight-loss pills now start at $149 a month cash, and the price climbs as the dose does. That makes GLP-1s a subscription, and most subscribers cancel. Bangladesh, where the drug got cheap years ago, shows that price was never the whole problem.
Jan 2, 2027
The ACA cliff turned patients into cash buyers
Marketplace deductibles jumped 37% to $3,786 and 2027 premiums are set to rise again. Millions of insured Americans now pay cash for most of their care, and Bangladesh shows what that market rewards.
Dec 20, 2026
GLP-1 Spawned a Whole Services Economy: Separate From the Drug Itself
Three $100M+ raises hit GLP-1 services in H1 2026. The opportunity isn't the drug, it's the economy forming around it, from the US to Bangladesh.
Oct 5, 2026
The remittance-to-health pipeline
Bangladesh took in a record $35.56B in remittances while ~70M face health hardship. Connect them: the country's biggest untapped health-financing rail.
Sep 11, 2026
Financing the uninsured: the missing rail in health
In Bangladesh, out-of-pocket costs are ~68.5% of health spending; ~70M face hardship. The fix isn't a clinic: it's a payment rail I built at national scale.
Aug 18, 2026
When patients pay cash, everything about the product changes
In the US, health products are built for a payer. In most of the world the patient pays: and that fact is a design discipline the US is drifting toward.
Jul 27, 2026Access and delivery 8
The pharmacy is the front door of care
In Bangladesh care begins at the pharmacist; in the US ~50M live in a pharmacy desert. Same underused node: the pharmacy as health's real front door.
Sep 22, 2026
Femtech: health's clearest open market
Women's health is worth tens of billions, yet barely 4% of biopharma R&D addressed it. The under-served half of the population is health's clearest open market.
Sep 15, 2026
FemTech's £1.5M Government Check Is an Anchor, Not Just Funding
The UK launched a £1.5M FemTech fund under its Women's Health Strategy, public money now formally backing a category private demand alone couldn't scale.
Sep 12, 2026
The lab is the wedge: diagnostics-led care
In cash-pay markets the cheapest way into care isn't a doctor: it's a test. I built care that led with the lab, the model richer markets rediscover at home.
Aug 25, 2026
The last mile - health tech's untapped value
Most health tech serves the first mile: the hospital. The untapped value is the last mile: the person far from care, reached where they are.
Aug 11, 2026
Telehealth's Fourth Extension Shows Regulatory Uncertainty Is a Distribution Problem
DEA and HHS extended telemedicine prescribing through 2026, a fourth temporary fix, still no permanent rule. Uncertainty is itself a distribution problem.
Aug 4, 2026
Prevention-first: the design window that closes
The US didn't choose sick-care: it backed into what the money rewarded. A market still building its system has an option the US lost: put prevention first.
Aug 4, 2026
Telehealth's second act: care that comes to you
Telehealth's first act was pandemic video for the waiting room. The second act is less a video call and more care delivered to your home, on your schedule.
Jul 31, 2026Medicines and supply 3
Bangladesh's drug regulator has to go digital before 2029
Today was supposed to be Bangladesh's LDC graduation day. The three extra years are a registration window: generics approved before graduation are the ones the industry expects to keep cheap. The bottleneck is not the factories. It is a regulator still working largely on paper.
Nov 24, 2026
Trust in the pill: the counterfeit-medicine problem
One in ten medicines in poorer countries is substandard or fake: a trust collapse you engineer out of the supply. Rich-world shortages open the same door.
Sep 8, 2026
The cold chain is the product, not the pill
US drug shortages hit 223 in early 2026, lasting five-plus years. For medicines, logistics is the health outcome: and whoever owns the last cold inch wins.
Sep 1, 2026Workforce and demographics 4
Rural America Is Running Out of Places to Give Birth
139 rural US hospitals have cut labor and delivery since 2020, a 13% drop in rural birth capacity. Here's the distribution fix hospitals aren't trying yet.
Oct 3, 2026
Aging happens fast now: before the systems are ready
Bangladesh's over-60s nearly double by 2050 with no home-care model; the US market tops $250B. Elder care is the next market almost nobody's building yet.
Sep 29, 2026
The US Could Be Short 86,000 Doctors by 2036
AAMC projects the US could be 86,000 physicians short by 2036, but the real gap, at full care parity, is 202,800. Here's what that means.
Sep 27, 2026
Losing One Nurse Costs a Hospital $60,090
US hospitals lose $60,090 every time an RN leaves, $5.19M a year on average. Why retention is a P&L problem, not an HR one.
Aug 24, 2026Bangladesh's digital health 2
Bangladesh's e-health hackathon names the real bottlenecks
Bangladesh's health ministry has launched a national e-health hackathon aimed at diagnosis backlogs, unverifiable prescriptions and lost referrals, alongside a health database for nearly 200 million people. Those are rail problems, not app problems. Build the rails first.
Nov 13, 2026
The healthtech leapfrog Bangladesh already made
Bangladesh jumped from cash straight to mobile money. In health tech the same leapfrog is the opening: build access-first, not a copy of the US. I've run it.
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