My Rx Pad Digital Health Technology Categories.
A shared framework for organizing the digital health and AI landscape — from wellness apps to FDA-cleared therapeutics.
Advances at the intersection of healthcare and technology — digital health — are reshaping how we prevent, manage, and treat disease. As real-time data, personalized interventions, and seamless patient-provider connectivity become the norm, the field is generating thousands of solutions across very different use cases, risk profiles, and regulatory pathways.
Digital.Health uses an eight-category framework to organize the 5,000+ solutions on the platform — helping clinicians, health systems, patients, and innovators find what they need by what it actually does.
The framework on this page was developed by the Digital Therapeutics Alliance (DTA) and Health Advances, then adapted for Digital.Health to organize the platform's growing solution directory. Read the original DTA Fact Sheet (June 2023) for the full methodology.
The eight categories, visualized.
The full Digital Health Technology ecosystem, mapped across industry/admin-facing, HCP-facing, and patient-facing tiers.
Software that powers health systems and the industry around them.
These three categories primarily serve healthcare providers, health system and hospital administration, and the broader industry — including pharma, medtech, payors, employers, and pharmacy. Solutions here are typically centrally adopted and indirectly impact patient care.
Health IT and digital health solutions for non-hospital and health-system stakeholders — pharma, medtech, payors, employers, pharmacy, and other industry players.
Enterprise health IT intended to provide non-clinical system benefits and support — including operational, financial, and workflow software.
Enterprise health IT and digital health solutions intended to provide clinicians with support managing their patient populations.
Solutions designed for patients to use directly.
These five categories cover solutions intended for patients to interact with directly — via mobile apps, computer software, wearables, or connected devices. The categories are presented in order of increasing clinical impact: as you move right, the bar for evidence, regulatory scrutiny, and willingness-to-pay all increase.
Disease-agnostic solutions that capture, store, and sometimes transmit health data and promote general well-being and healthy living.
Solutions intended to monitor specific patient health data that may be used to inform management of a specific disease, condition, or health outcome.
Solutions intended to support patient self-management of a specific diagnosed medical condition through education, recommendations, and reminders.
Validated digital tools for detecting and characterizing disease, measuring disease status, response, progression, or recurrence.
Health software intended to treat or alleviate a disease by generating and delivering a medical intervention with a demonstrable positive therapeutic impact.
The DTA and Health Advances developed these eight categories using five differentiation criteria. Each criterion clarifies how solutions are evaluated, regulated, and paid for — making the categories actionable, not just descriptive.
Who actually uses the product — patient, clinician, payor, employer, health system.
What the product claims to do — from general well-being to treating a specific disease.
Level of FDA, CE, or other regulatory body oversight required for the product to reach market.
Rigor of clinical evidence supporting the product's claims — from minimal to RCT-grade.
How the product delivers value — data collection, education, monitoring, diagnosis, or treatment.
Categories people often mix up.
Some categories share features — making the boundaries between them a common source of confusion. Here's how to tell them apart.
Digital health is the broadest term — it covers everything from wellness apps to FDA-cleared therapeutics. Digital medicine is a narrower subset: technologies that produce measurements relevant to clinical decisions and require some evidence to back their claims. Digital therapeutics are the narrowest tier: evidence-based, often FDA-regulated software that delivers a clinical intervention to treat a specific disease.
Rule of thumb: as you move from health → medicine → therapeutics, evidence requirements and regulatory oversight increase.
Patient Monitoring focuses on capturing data — vital signs, glucose readings, heart rhythm — that informs management decisions. Care Support focuses on helping the patient act on that data: education, reminders, self-management guidance. Many products bridge both, but their primary intent determines the category.
Rule of thumb: monitoring captures; care support coaches.
Both help patients manage diagnosed conditions — but Care Support tools generally don't claim therapeutic efficacy, and they don't require RCT-grade evidence. Digital Therapeutics make specific treatment claims, generate clinical interventions, and are typically backed by clinical trial evidence and regulatory clearance (FDA, CE Mark).
Rule of thumb: care support assists; digital therapeutics treat.
How these categories help you find what you need.
On Digital.Health, every solution in the 5,000+ directory is tagged with one of these eight categories. Use them to filter, compare, and orient quickly — whether you're a clinician, health system buyer, patient, or solution provider.
If a patient needs general wellness support, look in Health & Wellness. If they need monitoring of a specific condition, look in Patient Monitoring. If they need a prescription-grade intervention, look in Digital Therapeutics.
Categories on the right end of the patient-facing spectrum carry higher evidence and regulatory bars — useful when budgeting evaluation effort, coverage decisions, and integration timelines.
Knowing exactly which category your product fits helps buyers, regulators, and payers evaluate you against the right benchmark. Being clear about your category builds trust faster than vague positioning.
Browse 5,000+ digital health solutions.
Filter by category, search by name, or browse by specialty — the Digital.Health directory uses this framework to make discovery faster for clinicians, health systems, patients, and innovators.