Human First: Reclaiming Empathy in Our Love Affair with Health Tech

[Reprinted with permission by By Light-it, in collaboration with Digital Health Insider]

We are a species enamored with technology. I count myself among the early adopters who eagerly embraced gadgets promising to reshape how we live and heal. I owned an Apple Newton decades before smartphones became second nature. I strapped on a Fitbit long before step-counting became a cultural norm. I’ve carried an AliveCor device to track my heart rhythm because I care about heart health.

I’m fascinated by AI and impressed by the capabilities of ChatGPT and other large language models. But through all of it, a pattern emerges: while we sprint forward with healthtech innovation, we often overlook the element that gives health its soul—human empathy.

Hollywood’s visions of the future play out that tension. Films like iRobot and Outside the Wire imagine a world where advanced technology surrounds humans. Yet even in these hyper-connected futures, the human spirit, judgment and emotional resonance triumph over computation. Tech may win the movie battle, but empathy wins humanity’s greatest challenges.

So, the question becomes: in our real love affair with technology, how do we ensure that it doesn’t diminish our humanity but enhances it?

Digital Health’s Expanding Horizon

Health delivery is at a crossroads. On one hand, we are real-time participants in a sea-changing Cambrian explosion of innovation—AI models reading radiology scans, wearable devices transmitting real-time health data from patient to provider, voice assistants aiding mental health, AI tools “scraping” data from EMRs and predictive algorithms alerting physicians to early signs of disease. On the other hand, the average patient still struggles to schedule an appointment, reach a care coordinator, navigate their health insurance coverage or feel heard during a clinical encounter.

Digital health evolves faster than we can emotionally and ethically integrate into the care journey. As Hal Wolf, CEO of global NGO HIMSS, said in a 2025 HIMSS Europe keynote, “Old Organization + New Technology = Expensive Old Organization.” The implication is clear: technology alone is not transformation. It is a tool that is only as effective as the system and the people who apply it with purpose.

The Role of Emotion in Healing

John Nosta, a leading innovation theorist and founder of NostaLab, explores health decisions’ emotional and cognitive complexity in his essay Unraveling the Human Mind. He highlights the importance of understanding emotions like joy, guilt, and envy in AI development, reminding us that behavior is not driven solely by data but by deeply human emotional processes. This insight is critical: health behaviors—whether quitting smoking, taking medication, or attending a follow-up appointment—are deeply influenced by fear, hope, anxiety, trust and love.

AI can surface patterns, but it cannot feel. It can summarize a patient’s medical history, but cannot detect the tremble in their voice when they say, “I’m scared.” We must not confuse intelligence with insight or information with understanding.

Empathy as a Design Principle

For health tech to reach its most significant potential, we must design systems that understand and adapt to the human condition. That means:

Unfortunately, many current implementations miss the mark. A chatbot that dismisses a patient’s concerns with canned responses doesn’t reflect innovation—it reflects embedded institutional indifference. An app that tracks glucose but fails to create bridges to a community of support doesn’t reflect progress—it reflects a missed opportunity for connection and adherence.

The Power of AI and LLMs

Tom Lawry, former National Director for AI in Health & Life Sciences at Microsoft, captures this idea succinctly: “AI can automate highly repetitive activities and augment activities that are more highly varied and require a higher level of problem solving.” This duality reflects the essence of digital health transformation—technology that supports human expertise, not replaces it.

When used with intention, large language models like ChatGPT can democratize information, translate medical jargon, and surface unseen risks. They are powerful co-pilots in care. But they lack the capacity for compassion and their accuracy rests solely with the people designing the system.

I’ve often said that communication is the currency of care. That truth remains. The best outcomes emerge not from algorithms alone but from conversations between doctors and patients, health systems and communities, policymakers and people. Technology can facilitate these conversations, but it cannot replace them.

Leadership Needed

This is a call to the architects of our health future: More than “Don’t forget the patient, the caregiver, or the person behind the data,” people must be at the center of the action. We must remember that we are always people, only sometimes patients. Therefore, we need leaders—inside industry, government, academia and advocacy—who understand that digital transformation must be human-centered.

At the intersection of health and technology, we need humility. We need to listen more, build thoughtfully and measure success not just by the speed of a process or precision of a model, but by the quality of life it helps sustain and save.

Reimagining the Health-Tech Love Story

Our fascination with technology isn’t wrong. It’s natural. Much like the cinematic heroes in iRobot and Outside the Wire, we are drawn to machines’ capabilities but are also reminded that their greatest strengths emerge when paired with human insight. In those stories, it is not the tech that ultimately saves the day but the human instinct for empathy, ethics and engagement.

Progress is essential. But as we reimagine the health ecosystem, we must write a new love story—one where technology and empathy are co-stars, not competitors. One where innovation is in service of intimacy, and the promise of AI is fulfilled not in clinical outputs, but in human outcomes.

As someone who has watched health tech innovation unfold through the decades—from Apple Newton to neural networks—I remain hopeful. But hope, like health, is a human trait. It can’t be programmed. It must be lived.

Let’s remember that healing is not just about fixing bodies. It’s about touching hearts. Let’s code for that.