By Aidan Sowa, CEO and Founder, Frontier Industries | October 2026
Software founders learned to launch loud: ship, announce, trend, raise. Healthcare kept the receipt. Your buyers are hospital committees, your data is the most regulated information in the economy, and your category's funding fell by nearly two thirds from its peak while the survivors got interrogated harder. This guide offers one rule for choosing an agency: hire the team that can sell your company to a chief medical officer, a privacy officer and a journalist in the same week, with the same facts. Anything less is consumer marketing wearing a lab coat.
| Measure | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| US digital health venture funding, 2024 | 10.1 billion dollars across 497 deals | Rock Health, 2025 |
| Same figure at the 2021 peak | 29.2 billion dollars | Rock Health, 2025 |
| Individuals affected by the Change Healthcare breach | About 192.7 million | HHS OCR reporting, 2025 |
I. Discrimen
A download is not a deployment, and your buyers know the difference
Consumer technology measures attention. Health systems measure integration, evidence and risk. A digital health company's reputation lives in the second ledger: pilot conversions, peer reviewed results, security posture, and whether clinicians renew after the innovation team's enthusiasm cools. Agencies fluent only in the first ledger will generate coverage your buyers privately discount.
The distinction to enforce in selection: your agency must treat every announcement as a claim a hospital diligence team will verify. User numbers, time saved, outcomes improved, AI accuracy: each will be checked against your data room during procurement. A communications partner who inflates them is not helping you raise your profile. It is helping a future customer find the discrepancy.
In this market, the press release is part of the diligence file. Write it like one.
II. Machina
The funding machine slowed, and scrutiny filled the space it left
Rock Health counted 10.1 billion dollars of US digital health venture funding across 497 deals in 2024, down from 10.8 billion in 2023 and far below the 29.2 billion peak of 2021 (Rock Health, 2025). Average deal size settled at 20.4 million dollars, roughly the 2019 level in nominal terms and less after inflation (MedCity News summary of Rock Health, 2025). Of the rounds that were labelled, 86 percent were seed, Series A or Series B, while later stage checks shrank and sector M&A fell to a decade low of 118 deals (MedCity News, 2025).
Read that as a communications environment, not just a capital one. Investors and health system buyers now arrive pre sceptical, looking for the company with evidence rather than the company with noise. Your agency's job is to convert rigour into narrative: study designs, deployment data, named clinical champions. If their plan leads with vision and ends with validation, it is priced for a market that no longer exists.
When money gets careful, evidence becomes the loudest voice in the room. Hire people who can operate it.
Notice also where the remaining money concentrates. Healthcare Brew's summary of the Rock Health year notes that 85 percent of 2024 funding clustered in already popular value propositions, with mental health, cardiovascular, oncology, obesity, reproductive health and diabetes leading treatment areas (Healthcare Brew, 2025). If you sell into a crowded one of those categories, your communications problem is differentiation among near identical claims. If you sell into an unfashionable one, your problem is category creation with no budget for theatre. The two problems need different agencies, and a candidate who cannot tell you which problem you have has not done the reading your retainer assumes.
III. Exemplum
One portal without multifactor authentication rewrote every vendor's story
In February 2024, attackers entered Change Healthcare through a remote access portal lacking multifactor authentication, moved inside for days, and deployed ransomware against a company processing a vast share of American claims (UpGuard breach analysis, 2025). The final count reported to HHS reached about 192.7 million affected individuals, the largest healthcare breach ever recorded (Security.org, 2025). Prescriptions stalled, payments froze, and thousands of providers learned what a single vendor failure does to a month's payroll.
Notice the double lesson. For the breached company, the crisis was existential and operational before it was reputational. For every other digital health vendor, including companies with spotless security, the incident permanently raised the questions buyers ask: your incident history, your notification practice, your architecture, your tabletop exercises. An agency serving this sector must be able to draft a breach notification, brief a CISO for media, and turn your security discipline into a sales asset without ever sounding pleased about someone else's disaster.
Your competitor's breach is your buyer's new checklist. Answer it before they print it.
IV. Damnum
The cost of a data incident is priced, published and rising
Healthcare breaches are not an edge case your agency can treat as unlikely. Analysis of the HHS Office for Civil Rights breach portal counted 725 large breaches reported in 2024, affecting roughly 289 million individuals once the Change Healthcare figure is included (Security Boulevard analysis of HHS OCR data, 2026). IBM's 2025 cost of a breach research put the average healthcare breach at 7.42 million dollars, the highest of any industry, with the longest lifecycle at 279 days (reported in UpGuard, 2025).
Now price the communications share. Notification letters, call centres, regulator engagement and the two year tail of procurement questions all run through your public voice. A startup that has not rehearsed breach communication with its agency is carrying an unpriced liability into every enterprise negotiation. In selection, ask for the agency's breach bench by name and their first 72 hours plan in writing. The firms that have done this work answer quickly and specifically. The rest describe their social media capabilities.
Hope is not an incident response plan, and neither is a retainer.
There is a subtler cost worth naming: what a breach does to your roadmap. Notification and remediation consume the exact quarters in which your product team was meant to ship the features your sales team already described to prospects. Communications debt and product debt then compound together, because every delayed feature becomes a question about whether the incident is really contained. The startups that recover fastest treat the rebuild narrative as a product discipline: publishing their remediation milestones, their new controls and their audit results on a schedule they set themselves. Your agency should arrive with that rebuild template ready, not improvise it during the worst month of your company's life.
V. Genus
The variable your buyers grade is evidence, not enthusiasm
Strip this market to one controlling factor: health systems are drowning in point solutions and have started grading vendors on proof. Rock Health's 2024 analysis found funding concentrating in established value propositions, with AI enabled companies taking 37 percent of dollars across 191 deals (Healthcare Brew summary of Rock Health, 2025), which means the money follows categories where buyers already believe outcomes exist. Everyone else is auditioning.
Your agency should be fluent in the currencies of that proof: prospective versus retrospective studies, peer review versus white paper, pilot design, endpoint selection, clinician co authorship. It should also know the regulatory edge: which of your product's claims make it a medical device in the FDA's eyes, and which marketing phrases cross from wellness into disease territory. A team that cannot locate that edge will find it for you, publicly, at the worst time.
Say less than your data supports, and let buyers discover the surplus. It is the only discount that builds trust.
There is a selection exercise that surfaces this discipline in one hour. Give each finalist agency a real outcome figure from your company, with its study context redacted to the level a careful lawyer would allow, and ask them to draft the announcement paragraph and the three hardest questions a trade reporter will ask about it. Strong teams write a modest paragraph and brutal questions. Weak teams write a triumphant paragraph and no questions worth fearing. You are not testing copywriting. You are testing whether the agency's instincts run toward the version of your story that survives diligence or the version that merely survives the pitch meeting. In a market where funding has halved from its peak, the second instinct is a luxury line item.
VI. Regio
Five audiences, five kinds of doubt
| Audience | Their private doubt about you | What retires it |
|---|---|---|
| Health system executives | Another point solution that dies in committee | Peer deployments, integration record, total cost honesty |
| Clinicians | One more inbox, alert or workflow tax | Clinician designed evidence, time studies, respected co authors |
| Privacy and security officers | Your breach becomes their breach | Architecture transparency, audit posture, incident candour |
| Investors | A 2021 story at a 2026 price | Retention data, expansion revenue, disciplined claims |
| Patients and consumers | An app harvesting their worst moments | Plain privacy language, human support, restrained marketing |
The practical consequence: an agency serving you needs range that most startups never test in a pitch. Ask for the security officer version of your story and the clinician version, in the meeting, from the people who would write them. If only the investor version exists, you have hired a fundraising accessory.
Every audience suspects a different sin. Your materials should plead innocent to each, specifically.
VII. Occasio
The opening is the trust gap between AI promise and institutional caution
Edelman's 2025 Trust and Health research found health influence decentralising, with no institution fully trusted on health needs and younger audiences building their own ecosystems of voices (Edelman, 2025). At the same time, buyers inside health systems face boards demanding AI strategy and clinicians demanding AI proof. Between those pressures sits an unclaimed position: the vendor that explains its model, its failure modes and its human oversight more clearly than anyone else in its category.
That position is available to a forty person startup exactly as much as to a platform giant, because clarity is cheap and almost nobody ships it. Your agency should be pushing you toward model cards, published limitations, clinician explainers and honest benchmark reporting. The press in this sector is hungry for a company that will talk like that on the record.
Transparency is the last underpriced asset in digital health. It will not stay underpriced.
The practical form of that transparency is a public evidence page, maintained like a product: your studies with their designs and limitations, your security certifications and their dates, your model's evaluation results and known failure modes, your incident history stated before anyone asks. Buyers are beginning to request exactly this artefact in diligence, and the startup that already publishes it shortens its own sales cycle. Have your agency cost that page in the first proposal. It is worth more than the launch video.
VIII. Structura
Specialists with references beat generalists with reach
Digital health sits at a three way border: technology press, healthcare trade media and policy coverage, with the occasional consumer moment. An agency built for only one territory will strand you in the other two, and in this sector the territories cross without warning. A funding story becomes a privacy story. A product story becomes an FDA story.
Weight references accordingly. Ask candidate agencies for placements in the healthcare trade titles your buyers read, for policy coverage they shaped, and for one technology story that survived contact with clinical scrutiny. Then ask which of their current clients a hospital CIO would recognise. Fame in adjacent categories does not transfer, because your buyers are not adjacent to anyone. They are the most verification minded audience in business.
Your buyers verify for a living. Staff your story with people who expect to be checked.
IX. Consilium
Choose for the diligence meeting, not the launch day
| Agency option | Fit for a digital health startup | Principal risk |
|---|---|---|
| Health tech specialist agency | Native fluency in buyers, evidence and trade titles | Premium fees, and the best teams are selective |
| Healthcare practice of a technology agency | Strong product and investor storytelling | Clinical and privacy depth can be borrowed, not owned |
| Life sciences communications firm | Superb evidence and regulatory discipline | Consumer and growth instincts may be limited |
| Growth marketing agency | Excellent demand generation mechanics | Claim discipline is usually the first casualty |
| Founder led PR with senior consultant | Fast, cheap, close to the product | No crisis bench when the incident or inquiry arrives |
| Criterion | Weight | Evidence to demand |
|---|---|---|
| Evidence literacy | High | Their critique of a competitor's outcome claim, delivered live |
| Security and privacy fluency | High | A written first 72 hours breach outline for your company |
| Buyer audience record | High | Placements your CIO and CMO customers actually read |
| Regulatory boundary awareness | Medium | Where they draw your wellness to device claim line |
| Investor communications | Medium | Funding narratives that survived diligence |
The sector's other guides are gathered in the resources library, and the shape of an engagement is laid out on the public relations services page. Founders selling into health plans will find the companion guide for health insurance companies uncomfortably relevant.
Frequently asked questions
When should a digital health startup hire its first agency?
When your next audience stops being investors and starts being health systems. That is the moment claim discipline, evidence packaging and trade media relationships start deciding deals. Earlier than that, a senior consultant usually beats an agency retainer.
What should our agency do before any funding announcement?
Build the evidence file the announcement will be judged against: deployment numbers you can defend, clinician champions cleared to speak, security posture summarised, and limitations stated. Then write the release to match the file, not the valuation.
Can PR help us survive procurement?
It is already part of procurement. Diligence teams search your coverage, your incident history and your executives' quotes. An agency keeping that record accurate, current and consistent is doing procurement work every month, whether or not it ever meets your champion.
How do we talk about our AI without triggering scepticism?
Describe what the model does, what data it trains on, where humans decide, and where it fails, with evaluation results you are willing to publish. Buyers have heard a hundred pitches that promise transformation. Specificity about limits is the most differentiating copy in the category.
What is the agency's role in a data breach?
Speed, accuracy and stamina: notification drafting, regulator and partner communication support, member and customer lines, and the long tail of rebuild work. Rehearse it in a tabletop exercise before you need it, and make the agency attend your security reviews quarterly.
How should we measure agency value in year one?
Movement with buyers: meetings with target systems, RFP invitations, pilot to contract stories placed in trade titles, clinician engagement quality, and the absence of claim corrections. Consumer reach is a weak proxy for enterprise progress.
Do we need consumer PR as well as B2B?
Only if patients choose your product directly, and then it should be run as a separate discipline with its own claim rules, because consumer health marketing attracts FTC attention that B2B storytelling does not. One team can hold both if it staffs them differently.
How this guide was built
The market figures here come from Rock Health's annual digital health funding reporting as summarised by healthcare trade publications, and the breach material from HHS Office for Civil Rights portal analyses and published breach research. The limits: funding totals cover US venture deals and understate strategic and public market activity, and any year's breach count is dominated by whether a mega breach happened inside it, as 2024 demonstrates. Use the numbers to understand the scrutiny environment your agency will operate in, then test candidates against your own evidence file, which is the document that will actually decide your reputation.
X. Incipe
Where Frontier Industries fits in this decision
Frontier Industries builds communications for healthcare companies selling to verification minded buyers, and digital health is where evidence, privacy and narrative collide hardest. The practice pairs claim discipline with the practical machinery this guide describes: diligence ready announcements, breach rehearsal, and clinician credible storytelling. Meet the team on the about page, or compare with the guide for clinical research organizations, whose participants judge vendors by a similar standard.
Bring your evidence file and your incident plan, or your honest admission that the second one is thin. Begin through the industry campaign page, or call 401-219-4207 and describe the workflow you sell.
Sources
1. Fierce Healthcare, Digital health venture funding hit $10.1B in 2024: Rock Health. https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/digital-health/digital-health-venture-funding-hit-101b-2024-investors-focused-earlier-stage-deals 2. MedCity News, Rock Health: Digital Health Funding Drops in 2024, Investors Shift Focus to Early-Stage Startups, 2025. https://medcitynews.com/2025/01/rock-health-digital-funding-2024/ 3. Healthcare Dive, Digital health funding falls again in 2024: Rock Health. https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/digital-health-funding-declines-2024-rock-health/737476/ 4. Healthcare Brew, How digital health VC funding evolved in 2024. https://www.healthcare-brew.com/stories/2025/01/15/digital-health-vc-funding-evolved-2024 5. HIT Consultant, Digital Health Funding in 2024: Rise of the Mega Funds, Rock Health analysis, 2025. https://hitconsultant.net/2025/01/14/digital-health-funding-in-2024-rise-of-the-mega-funds/ 6. UpGuard, 34 Biggest Healthcare Data Breaches, updated 2026. https://www.upguard.com/blog/biggest-data-breaches-in-healthcare 7. Security Boulevard, Healthcare Data Breach Report: What HHS OCR Data Actually Shows, 2026. https://securityboulevard.com/2026/07/healthcare-data-breach-report-what-hhs-ocr-data-actually-shows/ 8. Security.org, Change Healthcare Data Breach: What Happened and What to Do. https://www.security.org/identity-theft/breach/change-healthcare/ 9. Edelman, Changing the Rules of Health Influence, 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Trust and Health. https://www.edelman.com/trust/2025/trust-barometer/special-report-health/rules-health-influence 10. Telehealth.org, 2024 Year-End Digital Health Funding Overview, summarising Rock Health. https://telehealth.org/news/2024-year-end-digital-health-startups-overview-10-1b-raised-across-497-deals/