Digital Therapeutics: Closing the Gaps in Chronic Care
A practitioner perspective by Avantika Sharma, Global Head of Healthcare, Brillio.
The argument
Traditional chronic disease care is fragmented and reactive; clinically validated software plus AI can deliver continuous, proactive management. Despite evidence in diabetes, hypertension, and mental health, DTx adoption is stalled by reimbursement, regulatory, and access barriers.
Why we picked it
The HTC editorial desk curates practitioner perspectives that pass a simple test: would a health system executive, product leader, or investor act differently after reading it? This piece by Avantika Sharma earns its place - it comes from the operating trenches of digital therapeutics, not the conference stage, and it takes a position specific enough to disagree with.
The bigger picture
The AI adoption question runs through every executive conversation in 2026. The evidence base is finally arriving: the largest controlled study of ambient documentation, published in JAMA, found clinicians saved 16 minutes of documentation time per day - but only a third of users hit the usage threshold for maximum benefit (our coverage). Meanwhile Rock Health has stopped labeling AI as a differentiator at all, because every company claims it - which is exactly why operating discipline of the kind described here separates winners from demo-ware.
Read it alongside our own reporting in Digital Therapeutics, where the data behind this debate is covered daily on the HTC Wire.