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Where Healthcare Is Growing Fast... and Falling Behind
Wellness economics are booming — but TeleHealth still has a trust problem
Good morning, ! This week we unpack the business of Wellness—its economics, its fastest-growing verticals, and where real value is being created. We also examine why Trust remains the biggest obstacle to TeleHealth adoption, and why Data Analytics has emerged as healthcare’s most critical non-clinical skills gap.
Sponsor Spotlight: Whereby is an enterprise-grade video call API for virtual care, built for platforms that need reliable, compliant embedded video and control over the patient and clinician experience. When reliability and trust become non-negotiable, teams often reassess their video layer, and Whereby partners closely to support a smooth migration and fast time-to-value. Book a demo →
— The Healthcare150 Team
DATA DIVE
Wellness Crosses Into Healthcare Infrastructure
The global Wellness Economy reached $6.8T in 2024, expanding 7.9% YoY and more than doubling since 2013 . At over 6% of global GDP, it now exceeds IT ($5.3T), tourism ($5.1T), and pharmaceuticals (~$1.8T). Projections push the market to $9.8T by 2029. This is no longer discretionary consumer spend. It is structural healthcare adjacency.
Three trillion-dollar pillars anchor the system: Personal Care & Beauty ($1.35T), Healthy Eating, Nutrition & Weight Loss ($1.148T), and critically, Physical Activity ($1.144T). Physical activity alone rivals major therapeutic categories, reframing fitness as preventive infrastructure rather than lifestyle spend.
Within that shift, Smart Fitness scales from $71.9B in 2025 to $186.1B by 2034, while Virtual Fitness compounds at roughly 29% CAGR through 2030. Meanwhile, health clubs double toward $244.7B by 2031, increasingly layering diagnostics and recovery services.
Capital is following outcomes. M&A rebounded to $77.2B in 2025, concentrating around platforms that combine biometric capture, AI personalization, and enterprise distribution.(More)
TREND TO WATCH
The Real Healthcare Talent War Is Non-Clinical
Healthcare’s labor crisis isn’t just about nurses and physicians. It’s increasingly about data scientists, AI-literate managers, and digitally fluent operators.
The largest non-clinical skill gap is in data analytics (42%), followed by leadership capabilities (34%), AI literacy (33%), patient experience strategies (33%), and technology adoption (32%).
Health systems are investing heavily in AI tools, interoperability, automation, and value-based care models, but lack the internal talent to operationalize them. Capital is flowing into digital transformation, yet human capital isn’t keeping pace. The bottleneck isn’t software; it’s skill sets.
For investors and operators, this creates two clear implications:
Execution risk is rising. Digital health ROI depends on managerial and analytical competence.
Talent-enablement platforms are investable. Workforce upskilling, AI training, and healthcare-specific analytics solutions are moving from “nice to have” to infrastructure.
In healthcare, digital maturity will be less about what you buy—and more about who you hire. (More)
PRESENTED BY WHEREBY
In virtual care, every failed or frustrating visit chips away at trust. Over time, that can mean lower engagement, more escalations, and higher churn risk. It also diverts product and engineering resources into troubleshooting instead of driving adoption and retention.
Telehealth teams typically switch video providers when reliability, compliance, and UX control become non-negotiable. Delaying can create silent churn, eroded trust, and stalled growth.
Whereby is a video call API built for virtual care use cases, enabling reliable, compliant embedded video with a user friendly, customizable experience. They partner closely with platforms to support a smooth setup and migration, and teams have seen support tickets drop by up to 60% soon after launch.
Built in Europe, they are trusted by leading Telehealth platforms around the world including Jane.app, Unobravo and Tebra.
If improving your virtual care experience is a priority, integrating a healthcare-focused video call solution should be on your roadmap. Speak to the team to discuss a migration plan and start testing this quarter.
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HEALTHTECH CORNER Brought to you by Whereby
Trust Is the Real Telehealth Bottleneck
Telehealth’s next growth constraint is not reimbursement. It is confidence.
According to the latest State of Virtual Care data, 41% of respondents cite lack of trust in telehealth as a major adoption barrier. That places trust nearly on par with connectivity issues (42%) and technology access (44%), and well above cost (17%).
The largest barrier is more basic: lack of patient awareness (55%).
This matters. After years of pandemic-driven acceleration, telehealth penetration has plateaued. The friction is no longer regulatory. It is perceptual. Patients question quality. They question privacy. And in some cases, they question whether virtual care is “real” care.
For operators, that signals a branding and education problem, not just an infrastructure one. For investors, it suggests that platforms solving trust and reliability will outperform feature-heavy entrants chasing marginal innovation.
Now look at how buyers choose vendors.
When selecting video platforms, decision-makers prioritize call quality and reliability (66%), followed by security measures (58%) and ease of use (58%). By contrast, only 22% cite an innovative feature set as decisive.
Providers are not buying bells and whistles. They are buying uptime, compliance, and frictionless workflows. Low bandwidth capabilities matter more than AI add-ons. Documentation ranks above innovation.
Why this matters now: The telehealth market is entering its credibility phase. Growth will accrue to platforms that reduce friction and build institutional trust, not those chasing novelty. In a maturing market, reliability compounds. Features do not.
COMPLIANCE CORNER
HIPAA Enforcement Sharpens on Risk Analysis and Patient Access
In 2024, federal HIPAA enforcement pivoted decisively toward failure in security risk analysis and patient access rights. The HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) closed 22 enforcement cases with over $9.9 million in penalties, chiefly targeting healthcare providers, including hospital systems and specialty clinics. Ransomware breaches dominated the landscape, but OCR also focused heavily on unauthorized disclosures, phishing vulnerabilities, and delayed patient record access.
Why it matters: These cases signal OCR's intensified scrutiny on core compliance pillars adequate risk assessments, timely response protocols, and robust workforce training not just breach aftermath. The agency further reinforces patient access obligations by imposing penalties for late or incomplete provision of medical records under HIPAA's Right of Access rules.
Key shift: OCR's move toward final determinations issuing binding decisions rather than negotiated settlements and its risk-based targeting reflects a more aggressive enforcement stance aimed at repeat offenders and systemic compliance failures. This enforcement posture complements ongoing adherence demands to information blocking rules designed to promote seamless electronic health information exchange.
Bottom line: As digital health ecosystems and data sharing expand, healthcare leaders must elevate HIPAA risk analysis and patient access governance from an IT checkbox to enterprise-wide compliance priorities. Executive leadership should ensure continuous risk assessments, reinforce employee training, and monitor patient access workflows to mitigate exposure and meet growing regulatory expectations. (More)
COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE SNAPSHOT
Whereby is trusted by leading telehealth platforms including Jane.app, Unobravo, and Tebra—built to support reliable, compliant embedded video at scale.
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