Building H #75: The Iron Is Hot

Some of our best experiences at Building H are the conversations we have with people who’ve seen our work and reached out to us to learn more and see how they can contribute. Back in the early days of the pandemic, Brittany Sigler connected with us on Twitter and became a key contributor to our first Building H Index report. She then took the question that motivates us – what would it take to get companies to offer healthier products – and pursued it as the basis of her doctoral dissertation, with our longtime collaborator Sara Singer as one of her advisors. Just before the holidays, Brittany defended (successfully!) that dissertation: Can Tech Be Good For Health? The Intersection Of Responsible Investing, Digital Products, And Social Impact.

In her dissertation, Sigler developed a conceptual framework that shows a potentially virtuous circle that links the development of health-positive products to ESG-focused investing, and, importantly, measurement related to ESG performance.

source: Brittany Sigler

She approaches the question of how tech company products could become more health-positive from three angles. In the first part, she uses interviews with senior leaders on social impact teams at tech companies and investors at ESG- or impact-driven firms to tease out the key barriers and facilitators. A key theme that emerged is the need for metrics, as standardized as possible, that could help assess product impact on health and thus help target product development. (This challenge is the purpose of our work on the Building H Index). Other factors included the importance of alignment between potential health benefits to corporate strategy, as would follow, executive leadership.

Sigler goes on to review tech company corporate reports to understand how they discuss health and notes that while concepts of health, including safety and ethical use, appear in many statements, there is a lack of a common language to discuss health – and in particular, there is minimal discussion of how products can create positive health outcomes. The third part of Sigler’s dissertation concludes with a case study analysis of Snap and Uber – examining the products closely, looking for alignment with ESG goals the companies have reported, and identifying opportunities for adapting the products to foster more positive health outcomes among their users.

It’s exciting to see this work come to fruition. It offers a number of insights that we hope to build on at Building H and Sigler’s research suggests that this work is timely. She concludes:

“Across manuscripts, across data sources, across stakeholders, one thing is clear: the iron is hot, and it’s time to strike. Interest and efforts are percolating, and public health should organize to help the private sector become the valuable partner they have the potential to be to positively impact the health of their consumers."

The iron is hot. It’s a great thought on which to start the new year.

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