Lidziya Tarasenka

Digital health tools have earned their permanent residency in healthcare. Most hospitals today offer patient-facing applications — and roughly two-thirds of US patients have accessed a health portal at least once. Yet more than 95% use it passively – checking notifications, but never initiating contact with the service. Is bad user experience to blame? Which engagement tactics are even ethically acceptable in healthcare?

Should I move to a different country? To boost my career, to pursue more interesting work and a higher salary, or simply to escape a war zone? Not long ago, the world was converging, and software engineering was a tailor-made profession for a globalizing humanity: decent pay, freedom to choose between cities, countries, and projects at will. But the rules are changing at breakneck speed. The future that IT specialists were counting on looks different now — fragmented, uncertain, and in some places, dangerous.

Platform engineering is a hot topic right now. Platform is a product with self-service features, providing the right infrastructure, tools, and processes that enable efficient, scalable software development, deployment, and management.  A 2025 Google Cloud/ESG research report found that 55% of global organizations have adopted platform engineering, with 90% of those planning to expand it further. In the majority of companies (85%), developers already rely on the platform.

Over the past year, the healthtech market has grown noticeably more demanding toward products tied to nutrition, disease prevention, and digital user support. According to Rock Health, American digital health startups raised $14.2 billion in 2025 — but the money is being distributed with growing inequality: the number of deals has declined while the average check has grown, as capital concentrated in the hands of fewer companies. Investors have become markedly more selective toward startups.

In early March 2026, Careem ran into serious trouble. Amazon announced that its data centers in the UAE and Bahrain had been hit by drone strikes, with full recovery expected to take a long time — making it the first known case of a major American tech company’s infrastructure being knocked offline by military action. Careem’s engineers pulled off something remarkable: a cross-regional infrastructure migration, completed in a single night. By morning, the lights were back on.

GPS arrived, and at some point we stopped reading maps. There was no decision made — it just happened, almost imperceptibly, over a few months of simply not needing to. A similar shift is now underway in finance: AI is taking over tasks that until recently counted as skilled, hands-on work. According to Deloitte, 87% of CFOs say AI will be very or extremely important to the finance function in 2026. The age of paper maps, it seems, has passed here too.

Healthcare systems differ widely in financing models, access to high-end technologies and nearly every aspect of care with probably one exception. Paperwork. It is unavoidable and merciless, in the US resident physicians spend an average of 45.6 minutes on the health records per patient. While the average ambulatory encounter runs 15–18 minutes of actual face time.

Enterprise networks were not designed for what we’re asking of them now. AI infrastructure, geopolitical fragmentation, automation, massive data flows between facilities: these things are piling up faster than most organizations can deal with them. We found someone who knows where the bodies are buried.

Many promising companies fall apart not because of bad ideas, but because of growth. Once a team reaches a certain size, the informal agreements and goodwill that once kept things moving stop working. Decisions get lost, accountability blurs, and instead of results you get endless process reshuffling and work for the sake of work. The way out is clear, firm rules. Today we talk about the attempt to reconcile creativity and structure inside large companies. Not everyone likes it, but there’s no other way to build systems that last.

Have you ever heard a doctor say something like: “Didn’t this help you at all? Hmm. Ok, let’s try these pills instead”? How does it feel to be a lab rat? Of course it’s not human experimentation — but what if you could get the right therapy without all that trial and error? Imagine your doctor had an exact copy of you to test all their ideas on — not on you. Wouldn’t that be fantastic? Today, this isn’t entirely science fiction. You can give your doctor a digital twin to experiment on.