6 connected strategy in the healthcare industry growing political pressure to find ways to manage these growing care costs, ultimately encouraging the development of companies that can succeed in delivering value-based care (better patient outcomes at lower costs).7 Finally, in terms of access, there is a shortage of healthcare professionals, particularly those dedicated to primary care as well as issues with "medical deserts" throughout the country.8 Given all of these macro-level trends, there has been a recent boom in technology-enabled, chronic-disease-focused digital health companies that are trying to disrupt traditional models of care and fill current gaps. These digital health start-ups employ connected strategies to enable more frequent and efficient touchpoints with patients that have ongoing conditions and need scalable, on-demand medical support/management on an everyday basis—essentially a solution to "the iron triangle." As noted above, one chronic disease area in particular that has seen the introduction of some successful digital health companies is Type II diabetes. Diabetes is the focus of many chronic disease digital health start-ups for a couple rea- sons. First, this is a very large problem with 1 in 10 Americans having diagnosed Type II diabetes, despite being a completely preventable and reversible condition. Second, this condition requires many changes in patient behavior to keep the disease under control, which can be extremely difficult for many individuals. Therefore, diabetes management could benefit from more touchpoints with providers and monitoring of patient actions/ progress each day to identify places for improvement. It follows that technology could be easily applied here in the form of wearables, sensors, and other smart devices to help fulfill this need for continuous care, monitoring, and behavior refinement. Today, there are a number of successful digital health companies in diabetes showing improvements in clinical outcomes, seeing meaningful patient engagement/retention, and gaining ac- ceptance from key healthcare stakeholders such as insurers. The types of connected activities that chronic disease management companies, partic- ularly for diabetes, employ include: integration of health-focused, smart technologies into patient daily lives; continuous collection, aggregation, and analysis of patient health data by providers; on-demand access to virtual medical care teams; personalized disease management content and educational resources; and behavior coaching (by professionals and peer support networks). Companies in this space combine a number of these connected activities to create a portfolio of care services, ultimately increasing willingness-to-pay (WTP) either from the patient and/or the patient’s insurer as well as 7 https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2020/jan/us-health-care-global-perspective-2019 8 https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/us-physician-shortage-growing