Opinion: Digital health startups may not want to do randomized trials, but they need to

The general theme of digital health care is easy to grasp — maybe too easy. Somewhere, right now, a hopeful CEO is making a pitch to a potential investor about how its new digital product or service will transform health care and improve outcomes, reduce costs, and save time.

The story works. Digital health care startups are attracting billions of dollars in risk capital, with aggregate investments reaching $7 billion so far in 2018, all in the hopes of modernizing our broken health care system.

While the story is easy to tell, proving it poses a far greater challenge.

As the CEO of a company that, partnered with to conduct the first large, prospective, randomized controlled trial using our FDA-cleared Virtual Exercise Rehabilitation Assistant (VERA) with traditional physical therapy.