Many retail and tech companies have jumped into healthcare with bold ambitions to “disrupt” the industry.
Walmart launched health centers in 2019 to offer primary care and urgent care along with telehealth services. Five years later, the retailer announced it was shutting down Walmart Heath. Best Buy spent $400 million to buy care-at-home company Current Health and recently divested it. Microsoft made an unsuccessful foray into personal medical records.
In 2018, Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway launched a high-profile healthcare venture called Haven to create health solutions for employers. Haven was shuttered three years later.
Hon Pak, M.D., senior vice president and head of the digital health team at Samsung Electronics, is aware of the challenges other companies have faced when trying to make inroads in healthcare.
“There are many skeptics out there who will say, ‘Many great people have come and many dead bodies have been strung along this path for trying to disrupt and improve healthcare.’ But also know that Samsung started as a grocery store not that long ago and is now a global technology company innovating for the future,” Pak said during a panel discussion at Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event in Brooklyn earlier this month.
Samsung Electronics acquired digital health platform Xealth to push deeper into healthcare. The acquisition will bolster the company's efforts to integrate data from its wearables and devices into clinical workflows and electronic medical records.
“The clear message is: Samsung is in it for the long haul. We're committed to health. We are serious about what we want to do and we want to make it better,” Pak said.
Samsung Electronics sees Xealth's capabilities as a bridge between digital health tech, including consumer tech like smartwatches and wearables, and traditional healthcare.
A Fierce 15 of 2023 honoree, Xealth was spun out of the Providence health system in 2017 and provides a platform that enables health systems to deploy, integrate and manage digital health tools. Providers can prescribe and monitor digital health content, apps and services as easily as they would medications. The company has a network of more than 500 hospitals and 70 digital health solution providers.
Samsung's expertise is in building hardware and devices, such as its Galaxy Watch, Galaxy Ring and Smart Home technology. At CES 2025, the company showcased its wellness solutions that can address key health priorities such as sleep and diet. As one example of its push into wellness, the company's advanced wearable sensors can detect signs of sleep apnea and then guide users to appropriate medical consultations.
Samsung is also working on a noninvasive continuous glucose monitor to incorporate into its consumer health devices.
As more care shifts to the home, Samsung has "home turf advantage," Pak told Fierce Healthcare on the sidelines of the Galaxy Unpacked event. The company sees big opportunities to play a bigger role in health prevention and lifestyle changes.
"I think we have a right to play [in healthcare] as care is shifting to the home where we already have devices and presence and trust," he said. "Trust is an important factor, and so we believe that gives us the ability to leverage AI to then bring meaningful insights and connect into the solution through Xealth and others."
Pak cited a study that indicated not getting enough deep sleep after the age of 60 increases the risk of developing dementia. Samsung's sleep management solutions could play a role in this area of health prevention.
Doctors only see patients a few times a year, yet patients are making healthcare and lifestyle decisions every day. "You visit the doctor and the doctor says, 'Here's your prescription, here's your imaging study I want you to do and, oh, by the way, I want you to lose 10 pounds. I want you to take your medication regularly. I want you to take your blood pressure.' Maybe you write that down on a piece of paper, and then you go back home and life happens. Those things just don't happen," Pak said during the panel discussion.
Technology can help bridge that gap, he noted. "Care becomes actionable as a nudge through your watch or a health AI coach," he said.
In that vein, Samsung Electronics plans to roll out a beta version of an artificial-intelligence-powered health coach in the U.S. by the end of this year, Pak said.
The AI-enabled health coach will initially be a chatbot within the Samsung Health app that will analyze users’ health data, particularly around sleep, nutrition, stress and activity, and provide personalized health guidance and also help users implement doctors’ recommendations, Pak said. It marks a significant push to bring AI-driven medical guidance into consumers' homes.
Samsung Electronics' deeper investment in healthcare also comes as consumer wearable devices are integrating more sophisticated health monitoring features. This year, Samsung enhanced the sensors on its latest Galaxy Watch to allow antioxidant detection, measure vascular load while the user sleeps, improve sleep monitoring and enable a more advanced AI running coach.
"We're working on some amazing sensors. What we're beginning to really do, passively, is to make it easier for people to understand what's happening in them, around them and be able to then share that with a care circle and family physicians," Pak said.
There's an arms race among wearable tech companies to add more advanced sensors and diagnostics, noted Mike McSherry, CEO of Xealth, now a part of Samsung.
"It's only going to get better. So what are you going to do? Live in a siloed world? Or are you going to integrate that back into the traditional care world? It's just where the evolution is going, and Samsung is jumping in front of that, saying, 'We want to work within traditional provider systems'," McSherry said on the sidelines of the Galaxy Unpacked event.
"Many other tech players have tried things. They tried to attack the companies. They tried to do their own thing. They went at it from their own asset base. At Samsung, we're good at devices. We build a lot of devices. We have a fairly ubiquitous presence. We now want to bring these clinical-grade devices into workflow and remote monitoring. And with Xealth, we have a collection of some of the biggest hospital systems in the country, and Samsung saw that as a path to relationships with these systems," McSherry said.
"We're building a bridge from worlds that have not been connected," Pak added. "When those two worlds have the ability to innovate and communicate, I think things happen. We're not saying we're going to change everything about healthcare. What we're saying is, if we build a bridge in the right way, in the right context, for the patients, the doctors, the partners, to come together, then we think we inevitably have changed the dynamics of how this is going to be in the future."
Hospitals and medical practices don't have easy access to health data from patients' wearable devices, and, conversely, tech companies can't get to patients' medical data.
"Nobody has a 360-degree view of what's going on in that person's life," McSherry said. "Xealth has access to the EHR data, which is the traditional source of truth. Yet the far more valuable data—you have to pull a signal from it—the broader set of data, that's coming from the 24/7 data that is coming from this," he said, pointing to a smartwatch on his wrist. "Finding the magic in the middle of the data sets is going to be incredibly powerful in the future."
Building an open health tech ecosystem
Samsung doesn't believe it has all the answers for how to improve healthcare. "I'll be the first one to say there's still a lot to do, a lot to figure out. And we will, I guarantee you, make some mistakes along the way at some point, because this is hard," Pak acknowledged.
As part of Samsung's strategy, it is supporting an open ecosystem of devices and data, incorporating other companies, health systems, payers, providers, organizations and patients, according to the company.
Health IT executives at health systems see the value of Samsung's approach to bridge the worlds of tech and health.
"Healthcare is hard. It's really hard. Many have tried to come into healthcare, outside in, and try to solve for healthcare—startups, smart tech companies, pharma companies. The reality is that with all of the challenges that exist in healthcare, it is not any one entity that can heroically go in and save healthcare. It really takes an ecosystem," said Rasu Shrestha, M.D., executive vice president and chief innovation and commercialization officer at Advocate Health, who also spoke on the panel at Galaxy Unpacked.
"That's part of the reason why I'm so excited about Xealth and Samsung and partners like us really coming together to solve for this challenge," he said.
Shrestha sees an opportunity to "broaden the aperture" from patient-centered care to person-centered care. "We can then move from more of an episodic, broken and fragmented care methodology and business model—that's the business model that drives healthcare today—to more of a connected, ubiquitous, always-on system of health. We can elevate the industry from transactional healthcare to experiential healthcare," he said.
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More seamless adoption of digital health tools and data also could shift the healthcare system from a hospital-centric approach to providing care to a "connected care everywhere" strategy, Shrestha said. "It's moving from bricks and mortar to clicks and mortar."
With this model, hospitals could operate more like "care traffic control centers," Shrestha said, integrating connected devices, AI and data from outside the four walls of the facility.
Advocate Health, which operates 69 hospitals and more than 1,000 sites of care, is embracing this approach as part of its "Rewire 2030" strategic plan. One of the health system's key focus areas is uniting healthcare with wellness programs and home health.
Digital health powered by AI
Advancements in AI technology are also a key factor in why Samsung believes the timing is right to push deeper into healthcare. Sensors and wearables that are powered with AI can detect health trends and insights from the user's data and also provide more personalized health recommendations. Technology can also simplify the user experience, Pak noted.
"In order to scale, you need AI, both machine learning and generative AI," he said.
"AI now can do things in two ways that are very specifically different: hyper-personalization and scaling. Because if you think about coaching, we all need coaches, but you can't deploy thousands of coaches with thousands of skills; it's just not scalable. And, we have a healthcare workforce shortage. With these automated tools with AI, I think now we have the ability to start executing. AI has changed our lives forever. Typically, healthcare is a little slow to adopt, but I don't see that slowness now," Pak said.
More widespread use of consumer digital health tech, and incorporating it into traditional medical care, can improve accessibility to healthcare, lower costs and support preventive health, industry executives say.
"I don't think we can underestimate the impact that companies like Samsung are having on affordability and accessibility," said Jim Pursley, president of digital health company Hinge Health, during the panel at Galaxy Unpacked.
Hinge Health uses movement-tracking technologies like computer vision to deliver virtual musculoskeletal care.
"As companies like Samsung develop powerful computing in your pocket, rich camera technology embedded into smartphones, we're able to do things more with edge computing. We're able to do sophisticated computer vision technology right in your pocket. It eliminates the need for expensive hardware. We don't have to ship purpose-built devices," Pursley said.
"We're really excited about the work that Samsung is doing, not just in health and sensors, but in the core consumer electronics platform. It enables and unlocks so much opportunity for us to allow you to get the latest, more sophisticated AI technology right in the palm of your hand," he noted.