From Vanity Metrics to Verifiable Outcomes: Why Digital Health Needs a New Scorecard

Digital health has come a long way in the past decade. More people have access to virtual care, health apps and connected programs than ever before. Yet growth has slowed. Despite significant investment, employers and health plans are still asking the same question: Do these solutions actually move the needle?

For too long, digital health performance has been defined by engagement dashboards and marketing-friendly numbers. App downloads. Clicks. Coaching sessions completed. Steps walked. Those metrics look impressive at a glance, but they don’t answer what matters most: Is there measurable improvement in health and cost?

The market is shifting. Purchasers are demanding proof, not potential. To keep pace, digital health needs a new scorecard built around outcomes that withstand financial scrutiny.

The Problem with Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics are convenient because they’re easy to produce and easy to promote. They tell a story of high engagement, strong participation and positive user sentiment.

But engagement does not automatically equal effectiveness.

You can have thousands of app downloads with no clinical impact.

You can have millions of steps tracked without improvement in diabetes control or weight.

Health plans and employers are no longer impressed with usage alone. They need to justify investment through measurable ROI. When budgets tighten and point solutions compete for limited benefit dollars, programs with soft metrics fall to the bottom of the priority list.

Redefining Success: From Activity to Accountability

A healthier, more sustainable digital health ecosystem is built on accountability. That means moving beyond self-reported results and siloed dashboards toward something better: claims-based outcomes.

Claims data is the language of the industry. It answers the questions employers and plans care about most:

• Are total medical costs going down?

• Are preventable emergency visits declining?

• Are fewer members progressing to expensive procedures?

• Are medications and devices being offset by improved health?

When results are proven within claims, there’s no need to infer impact. It’s verifiable.

Why Verifiable Outcomes Matter

When outcomes are validated within claims and consistently shared in a standardized way:

• Benefits teams gain confidence to invest or renew

• Members receive solutions that actually work

• Digital health vendors with real impact rise above the noise

• The industry moves from experimentation to evidence

Everyone wins. But achieving this level of transparency requires the right data, the right infrastructure and the right model for evaluation.

Solera’s Approach: The Next Generation of Outcomes

Solera was built to solve this exact problem.

We partner with leading digital health providers, but we don’t just surface engagement. We standardize, normalize and evaluate their performance through a single outcomes framework. Via our Precision Interception™ and Precision Navigation™ models, members are matched to the right program for their needs, while payers receive clear visibility into clinical and financial impact across the entire network.

Rather than isolated results from individual point solutions, Solera delivers:

• Claims-validated total cost of care outcomes

• Benchmarks across multiple conditions and populations

• Cohort-level insight that shows performance at scale

• Reporting that is consistent, transparent and trusted

This is what purchasers have been asking for. It’s also what the industry has been missing.

Why This Needs to Be the Standard

Digital health is entering its next era. The novelty of virtual care is gone. Employers have already tried single point solutions, disease-specific platforms and wellness apps. What they want now is simplicity, accountability and proof.

When solutions are held to verifiable standards:

• Innovation becomes meaningful

• Outcomes become comparable

• Investment becomes justifiable

Most importantly, members benefit from interventions that lead to better health, not just better engagement numbers.

The Future: A Market that Rewards What Works

If the next five years are defined by cost pressure, the winners will be the solutions that can prove real impact on total cost of care. Dollars will shift from dozens of unproven programs to fewer high-performing ones. Purchasers will expect claims-level transparency as the default, not the exception.

Solera is already leading this movement – bringing structure, measurement and financial clarity to a space once dominated by vanity metrics. By replacing activity-based success with verifiable outcomes, we’re helping create a market that rewards results, not noise.

Conclusion

The digital health industry doesn’t need more engagement stats or self-reported surveys. It needs proof. It needs transparency. It needs a unified standard that demonstrates exactly how virtual care changes cost and health.

Moving from vanity metrics to verifiable outcomes is not just a shift in measurement. It’s a shift in credibility, sustainability and trust – and it’s how digital health will scale for the long term.

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