Most people in tech are obsessed with "scaling." They want to talk about Kubernetes clusters that can handle millions of hits or AI models that "disrupt" diagnostics.
But when you look at it through the lens of Health Economics, that kind of "innovation" is usually just a massive hidden tax.
I’m currently focused on Digital Policy, and the more I look at the "hyperscale" cloud, the more I see a trap. If you’re building a health exchange in a market with strict data residency laws, AWS isn't your friend—it’s a liability. Why? Because complexity is the enemy of an audit. If your infrastructure is so "sophisticated" that a policy-maker can't understand where the data lives, you’ve already lost the trust of the people you're trying to serve.
We need to start advocating for what I call "Sovereign Simplicity." This means:
Regional Pinning over Global Mesh: If the law says data stays in-country, your network architecture should be physically incapable of moving it. That's not a "limitation," it's a feature.
Predictable Billing as a Safety Feature: In health-tech, a "spike" in your cloud bill shouldn't be the reason a clinic goes offline. Flat-rate, predictable infrastructure (like the kind you get with Droplets or simple VPS setups) is a moral choice, not just a financial one.
The goal shouldn't be to build the most "advanced" system. It should be to build the system that is the easiest to explain to a regulator and the cheapest to keep online for a decade.
In the world of health data, boring is better. It’s safer, it’s cheaper, and it’s the only way to actually scale a policy-compliant system in the real world.
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