Consumer brands are digital health’s missing link

At the EWA, we enable C-suite women to mentor each other to achieve personal and professional success. I am honored to share insights from thought leaders who are part of our peer-to-peer community.

This month I introduce Annie Bloomquist, a consumer and digital health executive who has spent her career at the intersection of consumer trust and emerging technology. She led transformations across retail, consumer products, and digital health. She serves on the board of a private equity-backed medical device company and advises growth-stage companies on strategy, commercial execution, and scaling.

Segil: Consumers are buying health and wellness technology in record numbers, yet research shows only a fraction achieving their wellness goals. What’s the gap, and who is responsible for closing it?

Bloomquist: Eighty-four percent of consumers in the U.S. say wellness is their priority. Consumers are wearing their devices and downloading apps. What is failing is the sustained connection that converts intention into behavior change over time. The technology has to work by being effortless, ambient, and acting on behalf of the consumer rather than demanding attention from them. Technology alone does not sustain a relationship. The industry has underinvested in the longitudinal trust that makes a consumer keep going when motivation fades. The tools and data exist. What has been missing is the relationship consumer brands are built to provide.

Segil: You state the most valuable asset a consumer brand brings to health is not its product.

Bloomquist: Yes, the most valuable asset is the relationship. It’s the longitudinal trust accumulated over years of daily life, and the data that trust makes possible. Consumers who believe in a brand share more honestly, longer. That’s what turns a consumer dataset into a scientific asset. What clinical health platforms cannot easily replicate is that earned relationship. The ones who get it right treat the consumer relationship as infrastructure and build the health platform on top of it.

Segil: You have led this kind of transformation from the inside. What didn’t you appreciate until you were in it?

Bloomquist: It is difficult to hold two business models simultaneously. Either the legacy business wins and the platform never gets the resources it needs, or leadership moves too fast and breaks the foundation that is paying for the future. What holds both together is a leadership team that can make the case for both simultaneously.

The patience requirement is different for clinical and scientific partnerships versus commercial ones. It is built over years, not quarters.

Realizing the consumer has begun to trust you with something far more intimate than you asked for is not a problem. It is the most significant obligation the work creates.

Segil: Consumer brands are accustomed to partnerships with defined short-cycle commercial returns. How does that logic change when health outcomes are the goal?

Bloomquist: The companies that skip third-party scientific validation, treating it as a marketing expense rather than a foundational investment, will eventually face a credibility ceiling.

Partnerships with health systems, research institutions, and clinical bodies operate on longer cycles and require patient capital. The leaders who get this right treat these relationships as an extension of research and development, not a marketing partnership. They staff and protect them accordingly. Third-party validation converts a skeptical consumer into an engaged one and a skeptical health system into an advocacy channel. It is a flywheel.

Segil: The lines between consumer brands and digital health platforms are blurring. What does that mean for how leaders should think about market opportunity?

Bloomquist: The important question is not what share of an existing market a brand can capture. It’s what becomes accessible as consumer and digital health sectors continue to converge. Consumers increasingly expect health outcomes from the brands they already trust, and health platforms increasingly need the engagement infrastructure that consumer brands have spent decades building.

AI accelerates everything in this space, widening the gap between platforms that have earned longitudinal consumer data. It is the data infrastructure AI needs. A platform trained on years of continuous consumer engagement will outperform one trained on episodic clinical encounters.

The ones who get it right define the business by what it enables, not what it sells.

Segil: What’s your message to the consumer brand executive or board who see this opportunity but hasn’t yet committed to it?

Bloomquist: The window is real. Consumer brands bring something that digitally native health platforms are spending years trying to build: an existing relationship and longitudinal behavioral data. The brands that move with intention now, building clinical credibility and staffing for the right leadership, will define the next decade of health outcomes at scale. The ones that wait will find the consumer trust advantage competed away by digitally native health brands that are learning the consumer relationship faster than most incumbents expect.

Larraine Segil is founder, chair, and CEO of the Exceptional Women Alliance.