The Healthtech industry has made incredible strides in supporting specific long-term conditions like diabetes, COPD, heart disease, stroke. But as we continue to innovate, we’re leaving a large group behind: people living with multiple conditions at once. Multimorbidity, defined as having two or more chronic conditions, is more than a clinical label. It affects how people experience care, interact with technology, and manage their health every single day.
Imagine being diagnosed with Long Covid, and also managing type 2 diabetes and depression. Or recovering from a stroke while navigating arthritis and heart failure. That’s the reality for millions, yet the systems meant to support them are often fragmented. Each specialist focuses on one organ. Each app tracks one condition. Each self-management plan assumes simplicity.
This is a serious problem.
Multimorbidity is not an exception - it’s the norm, especially in older adults and in communities experiencing poverty and health inequality. People with multiple conditions often attend more appointments, take more medications, and face greater mental strain. And they are more likely to feel disempowered, as their needs fall between the cracks of narrowly designed services.
Digital health tools have largely followed this single-disease logic. Apps are tailored to asthma. Or stroke. Or chronic pain. Rarely do they talk to each other or account for the full picture of a person’s life. This creates what many patients experience as digital overload: a different log-in for each issue, no coordination, no synergy.
At Pogo Digital Healthcare, we believe this has to change. That’s why Tailored Talks was designed with flexibility at its core. Instead of building rigid pathways for individual conditions, our platform allows for layered, customisable content that reflects real-life complexity. Clinicians, charities and care teams can create personalised information journeys that reflect the intersection of someone’s conditions - not just one silo at a time.
Our Long Covid users, for example, often experience fatigue, breathlessness, brain fog and they may also be recovering from cancer treatment or managing anxiety. With Tailored Talks, we don’t ask users to navigate multiple platforms. Instead, we curate content around their holistic profile, helping them find what they need, when they need it, in formats they can absorb.
This approach also supports the professionals working with them. Rather than toggling between multiple systems, they can use one integrated platform to track progress, assign content, and signpost support—all while acknowledging the interdependencies between conditions.
We must also consider the wider determinants of health: loneliness, digital exclusion, health literacy. A tool that acknowledges multimorbidity can also embed support for the social and emotional challenges that come with it. It can point to peer groups, mental health services, community organisations - adding wraparound support, not just clinical facts.
As integrated care systems take shape across the NHS and beyond, now is the time for digital health to follow suit. Innovation should reflect reality not idealised, simplified versions of it. And the reality is this: people are complex, care is connected, and tools must be flexible enough to support that complexity.
Let’s stop building digital health solutions for “ideal users.” Let’s build them for real people with real, messy, overlapping needs. Because health doesn’t happen in silos, and neither should our technology.