Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the deficiencies of health systems around the world, exacerbating systemic issues, and underlining the need to address the growing demands of an ageing population. Systems are struggling from long-term underinvestment and piecemeal funding that has been designed to manage rather than solve fundamental issues, an approach geared towards treating disease rather than optimising health – and a failure to fully embrace technology. Offering hope and real solutions to these problems, technology should be the centrepiece of a new health-care model. Harnessing both the power of data and advances in biotech can create a more predictive, preventative, personalised and participatory model, with the power to radically improve outcomes, dramatically reduce costs and bring about broader economic benefits. It is no longer sufficient to simply manage rising demands; we must ask how we reduce that demand too.