Half of digital health products now in production, Jabil survey finds

Fifty percent of digital health decision-makers now report their solutions are in production, the highest share since Jabil's biennial survey began in 2018 and a sharp jump from 11% in 2024. The figure comes from Jabil's 2026 Digital Health Technology Trends survey of 208 industry decision-makers, conducted by SIS International Research and presented at an Oct. 22 briefing. As products reach the market, the survey shows the industry's center of gravity shifting from building devices to making them work together inside healthcare systems.

How well is digital health actually performing?

The survey arrives against a backdrop of clinical results that have hardened digital health's evidence base. In a 2025 randomized trial published in JAMA, patients receiving robotic surgery for middle or low rectal cancer had a three-year pelvic recurrence rate of 1.6%, compared with 4.0% after conventional laparoscopic surgery. In diabetes care, a 2025 randomized trial published in NEJM found that adults with insulin-treated type 2 diabetes using an automated insulin delivery system saw HbA1c fall 0.9 percentage points over 13 weeks, versus 0.3 points for those on standard insulin regimens with continuous glucose monitoring. Time in the target glucose range rose from 48% to 64% for the automated-system group.

Why is AI confidence splitting in two?

The survey's most striking split concerns artificial intelligence. Strong agreement that AI will transform healthcare rose from 51% in 2024 to 70% in 2026. Strong agreement that respondents' companies had the internal talent to capture that opportunity moved in the opposite direction, falling from 49% to 20%. Shane Smith, Jabil's vice president of medical technology, tied the uncertainty to timelines. With some products taking three or four years to reach the market while AI advances rapidly, he said: "Trying to predict where AI is going to be at that point in time is an impossible task."

Development cycles are lengthening in parallel. Nearly three in five respondents, 58%, reported taking at least two years to develop and launch a product, up from 42% in 2024. For R&D managers, the combination of longer cycles and faster-moving AI capabilities raises a concrete portfolio question: which capabilities chosen at project start will still be competitive at launch.

What is happening to the product mix?

The categories under development are changing shape. The share of respondents developing or planning diagnostic equipment dropped from 59% in 2024 to 34% in 2026, and diabetes management fell from 36% to 16%. Surgical robotics doubled from 9% to 18%. Patient monitoring and chronic condition management remained the most frequently selected categories, at 49% and 45%. Eight of the survey's 12 development categories drew smaller shares than in 2024.

Erich W. Stein, Jabil's senior director of engineering services, read the wider spread as a sign of market maturation. "That, to us, is indicating that the adoption of digital health solutions across multiple end markets is happening," he said at the briefing. "We're seeing a broadening there."

He cautioned that the falling categories reflect wording, not decline. The question asked what companies develop or plan to develop, not what they produce. "The word here, 'develop,' to me is the key differentiator of why you see that shift," Stein said. Over the past four years, he noted, large numbers of diabetes management systems and diagnostic products, especially those using image recognition, have reached the market, and their makers are now sustaining and optimizing shipping products rather than building new ones.

Can devices actually talk to each other?

Integration has become the industry's defining technical problem. Jabil added integration with broader healthcare ecosystems as a response option in 2026, and it immediately became the most frequently selected challenge, cited by 73% of respondents. Stein connected this to the AI findings, agreeing that the technology's potential remains intact while execution proves difficult. "It is not easy to do," he said.

OEMs are discovering that digital health deployments involve many devices, often from different manufacturers, each with its own communication protocols, security measures and architectures. "And the challenge that the market is facing is how do all of those devices communicate together, and how does the data set come in from all of those devices?" Stein said. "How is that analyzed and interpreted to really, I guess, assess a holistic picture of health? And that is very, very difficult." He put the timeline bluntly: "That's, frankly, not going to be solved in the next couple years. That's probably going to take five years plus."

The survey maps the specific priorities behind that work: 68% of respondents selected healthcare data exchange standards such as HL7 FHIR and DICOM, 62% selected cybersecurity frameworks, and 56% selected integration with electronic health records.

What do payers want next?

Reliable longitudinal patient data is the other emerging demand signal. Seventy-two percent of respondents expected payer concerns about costs to expand demand for digital tools that support adherence and demonstrate treatment efficacy, up from 28% in 2024. Stein described the design goal as "set it and forget it," borrowing the catchphrase from Ron Popeil's rotisserie infomercials. Wearables that collect data for weeks at a time mean patients are "not having to go in and take a measurement every day," he said. With production at a record high and integration timelines stretching past five years, the next phase of digital health will be decided less by individual device performance than by how quickly manufacturers can reconcile their protocols, security models and data flows.