What If the Most Important Advances in Digital Health Aren’t the Loudest Ones—but the Most Practical?
Five Good Things
What if the real blood pressure crisis isn’t about access to care but what happens inside the visit?
Each week on Digital Health Talks, healthcare leaders cut through the hype to focus on what’s actually moving the needle in equity, access, and quality. In this episode of Five Good Things, Megan Antonelli and Janae Sharp kick off the new year reflecting on where digital health is headed and what’s genuinely worth paying attention to as 2026 begins.
With CES announcements, regulatory updates, renewed AI investment, and a packed healthcare events calendar, the conversation highlights both optimism and open questions shaping the industry right now.
From New Year’s Resolutions to Industry Reality Checks
The episode opens on a light note New Year’s resolutions, simplicity, and momentum but quickly grounds itself in a familiar truth: healthcare innovation doesn’t need to be perfect to be meaningful. It needs to be practical, additive, and capable of delivering real-world impact.
That philosophy carries through the discussion of “five good things,” a format that has endured for nearly three years precisely because it balances progress with skepticism.
Powering Progress Across Healthcare Touchpoints
Several developments stand out as early signals for the year ahead:
Health Impact Forum NYC is just weeks away, bringing together health systems, startups, regulators, and big tech to focus on AI, automation, and healthcare everywhere.
Regulatory momentum continues, with ASTP, ONC, and the FDA signaling openness to innovation—particularly in digital health and wellness—while still navigating interoperability and trust.
Venture investment is rebounding, with AI-driven digital health leading the surge, supported by strong year-end funding reports and growing confidence from firms like a16z and General Catalyst.
Big tech’s role in healthcare is expanding, as platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google explore health use cases raising both excitement and concern around data, accuracy, and guardrails.
These aren’t isolated moments. Together, they reflect a system actively trying to meet unmet demand for access, information, and care.
Why It Matters
Access: Patients are turning to AI tools because traditional care pathways remain slow and frustrating
Innovation: Investment and enthusiasm fuel experimentation that healthcare systems alone can’t afford
Risk Awareness: Confident AI answers can accelerate insight—or misinformation—without proper oversight
Community Impact: Conferences and forums remain critical spaces for alignment, learning, and accountability
As one recurring theme makes clear: people will always find workarounds when systems don’t work. Technology is filling gaps—but not without tradeoffs.
Looking Ahead: Healthcare Everywhere, With Guardrails
The conversation doesn’t position AI or big tech as heroes or villains. Instead, it acknowledges a familiar cycle: break, fix, iterate. The opportunity ahead lies in ensuring that innovation is paired with evidence, equity, and trust so healthcare everywhere doesn’t mean healthcare unchecked.
Enthusiasm matters. So does skepticism. Progress depends on holding both at the same time.
A Call to Stay Grounded—and Connected
As the healthcare calendar fills with events like Health Impact Forum NYC, ViVE, and HIMSS, the message is clear: real change happens when people come together to share what’s working, what’s not, and what needs fixing next.
Five Good Things isn’t about pretending everything is solved. It’s about recognizing momentum where it exists—and asking better questions where it doesn’t.
Because fixing healthcare doesn’t start with hype.
It starts with honest conversations, practical innovation, and a community willing to keep showing up.
Watch the Talk
Experts
Janae Sharp, Founder, The Sharp Index
Janae Sharp, FHIMSS, brings a rare blend of health IT expertise, convening power, and human-centered leadership to one of healthcare’s most urgent challenges: clinician burnout and physician suicide. As Founder of the Sharp Index, she operates at the intersection of data, storytelling, and systems change—working to heal the healthcare workforce from the inside out. Her work reflects a deep belief that sustainable healthcare transformation begins with those who deliver care.
What distinguishes Sharp is not only her background in healthcare IT business development, communications, and interoperability, but her willingness to center the human cost of a broken system. Through years of engagement with clinicians, health system leaders, and technology partners, she has seen firsthand how stigma, inadequate tools, and cultural silence contribute to burnout and mental health crises among providers. That insight shaped the Sharp Index into more than an organization—it became a movement designed to change how healthcare listens to, supports, and protects its workforce.
Drawing on her experience across digital health, advisory roles, and national healthcare leadership forums, Sharp built the Sharp Index as a data-informed and community-driven platform. The organization combines real-time analytics, peer-to-peer support, and partnerships with healthcare systems and EHR vendors to identify risk, measure the true cost of burnout, and drive action. Under her leadership, the Sharp Index has awarded more than 100 care grants, scholarships, and recognitions, while amplifying clinician voices to reduce stigma and accelerate cultural change. Her advocacy extends beyond technology, emphasizing that awareness, leadership accountability, and accessible mental health support are essential to preventing physician suicide.
Beyond the Sharp Index, Sharp continues to shape the broader healthcare dialogue as an advisor and partner to HealthIMPACT Live, a podcast co-host at Digital Health Talks, and a trusted voice across national conversations on mental health, leadership, and health equity. Whether convening executives, supporting frontline clinicians, or reframing how systems measure success, her work consistently reinforces a central truth: healthcare cannot lead without caring for its people. Through data, community, and courageous storytelling, Janae Sharp is helping redefine what it means to build a healthier healthcare system—for those who serve within it.