By Aahuti Rai, Founding Member, Hale House and Founder of Four Points Health.
Working with early stage health companies and established providers as an advisor and investor, and as a founding member of Hale House, I spent much of last year in and around Harley Street Health District. It gave me a front row seat on both the potential and the impact of innovation in healthcare.
From where I stood, 2025 felt like a real threshold year in many great ways. Digital health stopped being a fringe innovation topic and started feeling and behaving more like a core infrastructure layer.
Going into 2026, I predict a shift that sees providers, payers and life sciences companies less focused on whether to adopt digital and AI enabled care, and more on how to do it well. The familiar challenges have, of course, not gone away; reimbursement is still messy, regulation is still playing catch up and moving from pilot to scale is also still hard. But across the ecosystem there is a palpable sense of inevitability.
The announcements of the last two weeks, with Open AI and Anthropic launching ChatGPT Health and Claude for Healthcare respectively, raise big questions for what that means for healthcare and innovation at the macro and micro levels.
Offerings like ChatGPT Health and Claude Health are now making it normal, at least in some markets, for people to ask detailed questions about their health and see AI woven into parts of clinical and administrative workflows. Whatever any of us might think of the individual products (and yes, regulation aside), they’re a clear signal that large general purpose models intend to at the very least, sit in the background of healthcare in some way.
I think this also represents a broader shift. I’d predict that big tech will likely stay focused on general purpose foundation models and broad horizontal platforms. Importantly that doesn’t count out the brilliance and impact we’ve seen in other cohorts of health innovation so far – there’s room for much much more of the same. For me, the most interesting opportunities for startups and specialist partners lie elsewhere, in pathway specific, workflow integrated solutions that go directly to businesses and health systems rather than chasing purely direct to consumer plays.
I expect to see more hybrid clinician and AI care models that live inside particular journeys, such as chronic pain, mental health or long term condition management. When you are embedded at that level, you start to generate proprietary, longitudinal datasets around real people and real care, not just abstract prompts. That is where genuine defensibility and impact will come from, especially in places like Harley Street Health District and around the world.
On the funding side, I think 2026 will continue a shift that has already started. Traditional venture capital will remain important, but I expect more strategic and corporate investors, and more family offices, to step into health innovation. That matters because this money is often more patient, more focused on strategic fit with real services and less driven by short-term growth metrics. For founders and for providers in the District, across the UK and globally, this means thinking about partnerships that open the door to deeper collaboration rather than simple vendor relationships.
With patients increasingly exposed to AI-enabled health tools at home, expectations on both public sector and private providers are changing. This creates real opportunity for those providers to look at very specific problems in their own services, and to work with partners on hybrid clinician plus AI models that are tightly integrated into workflows, from intake and triage through to follow-up and administration.
Finally, a word on direct-to-consumer health – it’s not really one we can ignore! I suspect it will become even harder to build sustainable, standalone D2C health products in 2026. When people already have access to powerful, broad spectrum tools on their phones, any new product has to offer something much more specific, grounded and connected to real care to earn its place, which is why I tend to be most excited by solutions that sit at the intersection of patients, clinicians and systems.
We still do not have a perfect playbook for scaling digital health, but 2025 moved us closer, and 2026 will build on that. With its mix of clinical excellence, entrepreneurial energy and growing digital infrastructure, I’m looking forward to seeing how we collectively move beyond AI headlines and into the more interesting, messy work of making this technology genuinely useful in day-to-day care.
