Jabil’s 2026 digital health survey: Confidence in AI’s potential rises as confidence in internal readiness falls

Digital health, a term that took hold around the turn of the century as health information and transactions moved online, has grown up. The technology’s promise to enable revolution in healthcare has, in many respects, come true. For instance, when surgical robotics was still proving itself, superiority over conventional surgery wasn’t always a sure thing. But the field has advanced steadily. In a 2025 randomized trial published in JAMA, patients undergoing 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, automated insulin delivery has moved beyond its original use in type 1 diabetes. In a 2025 randomized trial published in NEJM, adults with insulin-treated type 2 diabetes who used an automated system saw their HbA1c fall 0.9 percentage points over 13 weeks, compared with 0.3 points for those who kept their usual insulin regimen with continuous glucose monitoring. Their time in the target glucose range rose from 48% to 64%.

Against that backdrop, Jabil, a contract manufacturer that helps design, engineer and produce medical devices, has released its 2026 Digital Health Technology Trends survey. Conducted by SIS International Research, the survey of 208 industry decision-makers found that half reported their digital healthcare solutions were in production, the highest share since the biennial research began in 2018. As those products reach the market, integrating them into broader healthcare systems has emerged as a central challenge.

While interest in digital health remains high, its next gains may lie on higher branches. Capturing them increasingly requires manufacturers to make devices work together across broader healthcare systems, the survey’s most frequently cited challenge. Development cycles are also lengthening with nearly three in five respondents (58%) reporting taking at least two years to develop and launch a product, up from 42% in 2024.

AI is increasingly a focus for medical device companies, given its potential to help with everything from identifying patterns in patient information to generating alerts and supporting clinical decisions. Its rapid evolution also presents a planning hurdle: AI capabilities chosen during development could be overtaken by the time a device reaches the market. Companies are increasingly confident in the technology’s potential, even as confidence in their internal capabilities falls. Strong agreement that AI will transform healthcare rose from 51% in 2024 to 70% in 2026. Meanwhile, strong agreement that respondents’ companies had the internal talent to capture that opportunity fell from 49% to 20%. Shane Smith, Jabil’s vice president of medical technology, tied part of that uncertainty to development timelines. With some products taking three or four years to reach the market as AI advances rapidly, he said, “Trying to predict where AI is going to be at that point in time is an impossible task.”

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The digital health landscape mix continues to shift

The mix of digital-health products under development is shifting. The share of respondents developing or planning diagnostic equipment dropped from 59% in 2024 to 34% in 2026, while diabetes management fell from 36% to 16%. Surgical robotics moved in the other direction, doubling from 9% to 18%. Patient monitoring and chronic condition management remained the most frequently selected categories, at 49% and 45%.

Jabil reads the shift as a sign of wider adoption. Presenting the results during the Oct. 22 briefing, Erich W. Stein, Jabil’s senior director of engineering services, said the 2026 results looked more spread out than the 2024 data. “That, to us, is indicating that the adoption of digital health solutions across multiple end markets is happening,” he said. “We’re seeing a broadening there.” He pointed to patient monitoring and chronic disease management as categories that remain prominent, and to surgical robotics as a newcomer.

Within that changing mix, respondents selected fewer development categories on average. Eight of the 12 development categories drew smaller shares of respondents than in 2024.

Stein attributed the declines in diagnostics and diabetes management to earlier products hitting the market. Asked during the briefing about the falling categories, he pointed to the question’s wording, which asked what companies develop or plan to develop. “The word here, ‘develop,’ to me is the key differentiator of why you see that shift,” Stein said. “It doesn’t talk about production. It talks about development.”

Over the past four years, he said, a large number of diabetes management systems and diagnostic products, especially those using image recognition, have reached the market. Those companies, he said, are now focused on sustaining and optimizing products already on the market.

Across the survey, the share of respondents reporting technologies in production jumped from 11% in 2024 to 50% in 2026.

Getting devices to work together

Making devices from different manufacturers exchange data securely and work with hospital systems adds complexity to product development. Seventy-three percent of respondents selected integration with broader healthcare ecosystems as a challenge. Jabil added that response option in 2026, when it became the most frequently selected answer.

Asked whether the AI findings reflected a similar pattern, with the technology’s potential intact and execution proving difficult, Stein agreed. “It is not easy to do,” he said. He then described what he sees as the underlying problem: OEMs are realizing that digital health involves many devices, often from different manufacturers.

“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?” he said. “How is that analyzed and interpreted to really, I guess, assess a holistic picture of health? And that is very, very difficult.”

Those devices bring their own communication protocols, security measures and architectures, Stein said, and reconciling them will take time. “That’s, frankly, not going to be solved in the next couple years,” he said. “That’s probably going to take five years plus.”

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

‘Set it and forget it’

The usefulness of connected medical devices also depends on patients supplying reliable data over time, which is a goal made easier by devices that are themselves easy to use. Wearable devices can support this goal by collecting measurements automatically for days or weeks. The survey points to growing demand for such capability: 72% 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 a growing focus on devices that are “set it and forget it,” borrowing the catchphrase from Ron Popeil’s rotisserie infomercials. “A lot of these digital health solutions are wearable solutions, and those wearable solutions will monitor and collect data for, in some cases, weeks,” he said. Patients are “not having to go in and take a measurement every day. They’re going in, getting a wearable placed, and now you’re able to reliably collect data from that wearable over those times,” he said.