Marketing Strategy for Health Technology and Digital Health

In my experience this is rarely a product problem or a channel problem. It is a clarity problem. Health technology is one of the hardest categories in the market to describe, because the person you are selling to is not one person. A single decision can involve a clinician, an IT lead, a compliance officer, a finance director and a chief executive, and each of them is judging you against a different standard.

When your positioning is not sharp, every one of those people fills the gap with their own assumption. That is what quietly costs you the sale.

Australia's digital health sector is expanding quickly, backed by serious government investment. In the 2026-27 Budget the Commonwealth committed 598.3 million dollars over two years to My Health Record alone, part of a broad national push to connect the health system.

Growth attracts entrants. More companies, more noise, and more sophisticated buyers who have already seen a dozen decks that all promise better outcomes and lower cost. The bar for being understood, and believed, keeps rising. In that environment the company that can explain clearly what it does, who it is for and why it is worth trusting has a real commercial advantage over a better funded competitor that cannot.

Health technology marketing sits inside a regulatory frame that most general marketers do not understand, and getting it wrong carries real consequences.

If your product meets the definition of a medical device under the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989, the way you advertise it is regulated by the Therapeutic Goods Administration. The point most founders miss is that your marketing claims can change your regulatory status. The TGA is explicit that promoting software as able to diagnose, predict, prevent, treat or monitor a disease can establish a therapeutic purpose and pull your product into medical device regulation. The words on your website can move you across that line.

The rules also differ depending on who you are talking to. Advertising directed only at health professionals is treated differently from advertising aimed at consumers, where the full set of therapeutic goods advertising rules applies. The TGA has named software as a medical device as a compliance and enforcement priority for 2026 and 2027, so this is not a theoretical risk.

At the same time, the national digital health infrastructure is being rebuilt around interoperability. Under the sharing by default reforms, more health information is being connected across the system, and the Australian Digital Health Agency is using conformance and standards to drive it. If your product touches clinical data, your ability to speak credibly about interoperability, security and standards is now part of your commercial story, not just your engineering roadmap.

Marketing in this sector is not a matter of applying generic tactics. It has to be built by someone who understands where the regulatory lines sit and how to position confidently inside them.

Sources: Advertising software-based medical devices in Australia (Therapeutic Goods Administration, tga.gov.au); Regulation of software-based medical devices under the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989 (Therapeutic Goods Administration, tga.gov.au); My Health Record and Sharing by Default (Australian Digital Health Agency, digitalhealth.gov.au); Modernising My Health Record, improved access to health information (Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, health.gov.au); Budget 2026-27 My Health Record investment (Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, health.gov.au).

The job is not more activity. It is clarity. Before campaigns, before a new website, before content, the questions that have to be answered are simple to ask and hard to answer well. Who is the real buyer. What do they need to understand. What makes you genuinely different. And how do you say it in a way that is both compelling and compliant.

Get those right and everything downstream gets easier. Get them wrong and no amount of spend will fix it.