Leading with Heart in Health Tech
Health tech is undergoing a pivotal transformation — one that requires us to move beyond the binary language of code and outcomes, and reframe innovation through a human lens.
At Careology, we believe the most powerful force in healthcare isn’t just artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, or operational scale. It’s empathy. It’s heart.
Our mission is to empower people living with cancer, help them feel more in control, less overwhelmed, and better supported. Not just during hospital visits or clinical consults, but in all the moments in-between. This philosophy isn’t just aspirational. It’s foundational to how we build, lead, and grow.
Why Compassion Should Power Innovation
In health tech, it’s easy to focus on efficiency and clinical metrics, but behind every dashboard is a person navigating one of the most challenging chapters of their life. My wife’s cancer diagnosis made it clear to me how little support exists outside the hospital, with some of the hardest moments being how we learned to manage daily decisions and emotional strain. That experience inspired Careology, starting not with a product, but with a problem: how to help people feel safe and supported during uncertain times.
As founders and leaders, we must design with both outcomes and emotions in mind. Empathy-led design drives engagement, adherence, and trust. It creates technology that people want to use, not just because they’re told to, but because it truly helps them.
This belief has shaped everything we do at Careology — from how we triage symptoms using AI and human oversight, to the language we use in our app to reassure someone logging troubling side effects at 2 AM. Every interaction is an opportunity to offer clarity, calm, and authentic care.
Embedding Heart Into Company Culture
Health techs looking to build a sustainable, compassionate, and innovative organization have to start with company culture. At its core, culture is defined by the values we uphold when nobody’s watching. I seek out people who care deeply — quiet listeners, thoughtful builders, and those who truly empathize with what it means to face cancer.
At Careology, patients and caregivers are true collaborators, involved in design sprints, user testing, and roadmap decisions. By putting people first, we ensure our technology is intuitive, reassuring, and empowering — tools that don’t just digitize cancer care, but humanize it. Some of our best innovations come from a patient saying, “I just wish I had known what to expect that morning.” Those are the insights that drive meaningful design.
We run values-led onboarding, build rituals of reflection, and champion cross-functional learning so engineers hear directly from clinicians and patients. This cultural operating system keeps us aligned, agile, and authentic.
As we scale our footprint across the U.K. and U.S., we’re more intentional than ever about preserving this ethos. Because the moment we lose heart, we lose our edge.
A Call to Action
To fellow health tech founders, investors, clinicians, and caregivers: let’s not forget that our most powerful tool is our capacity to care.
Building with compassion takes intention. For example, we use internal measures, like tracking user sentiment, reviewing product features for values alignment, and gathering regular feedback from patients, clinicians, and partners, to help guide our decisions. We also try to always ask ourselves not just what we’re building, but why now, and who for.
Let’s lead with heart. Let’s champion human-first design. Let’s build products and partnerships that make a real difference in people’s lives. Because in healthcare, the best outcomes don’t just come from what we build — they come from why we build it.
About Paul
Paul Landau is the Founder and CEO of Careology, a digital health company focused on cancer care. His motivation for founding Careology stems from his wife's firsthand experience with cancer diagnosis and treatment, combined with his 20 years of experience in healthtech.
Landau built Careology to address the significant challenges patients face, such as managing complex schedules, understanding symptoms, and overcoming hesitation to contact healthcare teams. Under his leadership, Careology develops thoughtful software and targeted tools, clinically tested by oncologists, to create unique patient profiles. The company's mission is to make its digital innovation, clinical precision, and care navigation accessible to every person affected by cancer, ultimately improving the treatment experience and delivering value to health systems.