Scarlett Chen does not do wellness buzzwords.
As a partner at Verge, a Hong Kong–based fund that backs health technology companies, she spends her days separating what actually works from what merely sounds good. Before Verge, she was at Barclays and Prudential. She knows how money moves. She also knows how health systems fail.
When she spoke on a panel at the Maestro Wellness Summit, the room was full of the usual suspects: founders, investors, clinicians, all circling the same big question. Why, after years of talk about preventive health, are we still mostly waiting for people to get sick before we do anything about it?
Scarlett’s answer was characteristically blunt: the system was never built to keep people well. It was built to treat them when they aren’t.
The problem is in the name
In Cantonese, the word for healthcare is 醫療. It translates directly to “medical treatment.” There is no concept of staying healthy built into it. The whole machinery—training, incentives, pharmaceutical supply chains, insurance models—is set up around the assumption that something has already gone wrong.
“Clinicians are trained to diagnose diseases and provide cures,” Scarlett says. “They are not trained to keep patients well, and they are not incentivized to do so.”
Fixing that, she argues, is not just a question of better apps or smarter wearables. It means changing who gets paid for what—and that is a much slower, harder problem than most wellness entrepreneurs want to admit.
Measuring things we used to guess at
One of the things Verge looks for is companies that have found ways to measure what doctors previously had to rely on instinct for.
Take ViewMind, which tracks tiny eye movements to detect neurological conditions. What used to be a clinician’s hunch—a feeling that something was slightly off in the way a patient was focusing—is now something you can actually measure. Another portfolio company, Zoundream, does something similar with infant cries. It turns out there is a wealth of clinical information in how a baby sounds, if you have the right tools.
The harder part, Scarlett says, is not building the technology. It is turning the data into something a doctor can act on—and convincing regulators to accept it as valid evidence.
Hong Kong and the GBA: more complicated than the pitch
The Greater Bay Area is constantly pitched as a growth opportunity in health. Scarlett disagrees—at least with the simple version.
“It is not a single market. It is three regulatory environments in close geographic proximity,” she says. A product approved in mainland China faces different rules in Hong Kong, and different rules again in Europe or the United States. For the right company, that can actually be useful—you can test across multiple systems at once. But founders who walk in expecting one unified market tend to find out quickly that it isn’t.
Hong Kong’s real value, in her view, is as a bridge: between Eastern and Western medicine, between early-stage companies and the capital that can scale them.
Why people actually have to use the thing
One of Verge’s portfolio companies, CareLoop, builds digital tools for people living with severe mental illness, including schizophrenia and psychosis. It is one of the hardest groups to reach with any technology at all. The founder, Zoe Blake, has a background in mental health, and what CareLoop has shown is that people actually keep using the tool—and when they do, they end up in the hospital less often.
Scarlett talks about this one with real warmth. “Habit formation is not just a design question,” she says. “It requires building around how the patient actually lives, not around what is convenient for the clinic.”
Founders who understand both behavior change and clinical evidence are rare, she says. When you find one, it shows.
More technology, more humanity
Here is the argument Scarlett makes that tends to surprise people: AI in healthcare will not make appointments less personal. It will make them more so.
Think about what takes up most of a doctor’s time right now: note-taking, staring at a screen, administrative work. If AI handles that, the doctor can actually look at the patient. “We are digitizing to humanize the patient journey,” she says.
We are nowhere near a world where the machine replaces the doctor. There are already not enough physicians. The goal is to free up the ones we have.
The consumer who has moved on
Five years ago, Scarlett wore an Oura ring, and people asked what it was. Now almost everyone has one—or a Whoop, or an Apple Watch. People know a lot more about their own bodies than they did a few years ago, and COVID is a big part of why.
What she is watching now is the gap between a clinical device and a consumer product. Those have traditionally been very different things, built by different people, sold in different ways. But better sensors and more processing power are starting to blur that line.
So what happens next?
Scarlett is keeping a close eye on one specific FDA approval expected this year—a piece of technology she describes only as “in a very hot space.” She won’t name the company yet.
But the bigger shift, she says, won’t come from any single approval. It will come when preventive health stops being a lifestyle category and starts being the actual business model. Right now, no one gets paid to keep you well. Insurers pay for surgeries, not for sleep. Employers pay for sick days, not for better metabolic health. Until that flips, even the best technology is just a very smart Band-Aid.
“The first insurer or health system that genuinely figures out how to reward long-term health instead of acute treatment will change everything,” Scarlett says. “That’s the real unicorn. Not an app. A new economic model.”
“And that’s not a buzzy thing to say. But it’s the truth.”
Scarlett Chen is the founding partner of Verge, a healthtech venture fund investing across digital health, diagnostics and the longevity economy. She spoke at the Maestro Wellness Summit in 2025.