For about the past decade, an open question about Big Tech has been their possible entry strategy into healthcare and whether they would be successful. Healthcare constitutes a very large portion of the U.S. economy so it won't be ignored by tech giants such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and even Facebook. A recent article addressed this specific question (see: How Big Tech Is Going After Your Health Care). It's long so read the whole article if interested. Below is an excerpt from it:
Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants have transformed the way billions of us communicate, shop, socialize and work. Now, as consumers, medical centers and insurers increasingly embrace health-tracking apps, tech companies want a bigger share of the more than $3 trillion spent annually on health care in the United States, too....The companies are accelerating their efforts to remake health care by developing or collaborating on new tools for consumers, patients, doctors, insurers and medical researchers. And they are increasingly investing in health start-ups.....In the first 11 months of this year, 10 of the largest tech companies in the United States were involved in health care equity deals worth $2.7 billion, up from just $277 million for all of 2012, according to data from CB Insights....Each tech company is taking its own approach, betting that its core business strengths could ultimately improve people’s health — or at least make health care more efficient. Apple, for example, has focused on its consumer products, Microsoft on online storage and analytics services, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, on data.... Physicians and researchers caution that it is too soon to tell whether novel continuous-monitoring tools, like apps for watches and smartphones, will help reduce disease and prolong lives — or just send more people to doctors for unnecessary tests.....
The tech industry is certainly no stranger to health. IBM, Intel and Microsoft have long provided enterprise services to the health care industry....This year, Amazon was one of the investors in a financing round for Grail, a cancer-detection start-up, which raised more than $900 million. Apple acquired Beddit, a maker of sleep-tracking technology, for an undisclosed amount. And Alphabet, perhaps the most active American consumer tech giant in health and biotech, acquired Senosis Health, a developer of apps that use smartphone sensors to monitor certain health signals, also for an undisclosed amount. Alphabet also has a research unit, Verily Life Sciences, dedicated to developing new tools to collect and analyze health data.....Apple is taking a different approach — using its popular iPhone and Apple Watch to help consumers better track and manage their health. “Apple is trying to drag medicine from where it currently takes place — in hospitals and clinics — and move it to the consumer side, to your phone,” said [a venture capital executive].
Many of Big Tech's initiatives in the healthcare market in the past have failed or been disappointing (see, for example: Microsoft Purchases Thai Software Firm Involved in Medical Tourism; Microsoft Renames and "Integrates" Its Healthcare Software Line; Apple Watch "Gifted" to Insurance Policy Holders; Any Gotcha's with the Deal?; Could Apple Be Trying to Develop a "Patient Portal" for the iPhone?). There is no question that the equity deals will continue (see: Microsoft, Google invest in precision medicine startup DNAnexus). We all know that healthcare organizations are sitting on a mountain of data but the leadership has little understanding about how to capitalize on this advantage. They certainly know enough to lobby against patients' access to it (see: Your Health Records Don't Belong to You; It's Time for a Change in the State Laws). However, hospital executives need the expertise of Silicon Valley in order to pursue clinical analytics projects involving big data and deep learning.
My own view about the future of Big Tech in healthcare, in addition to the equity deals, is that it will focus on healthcare wearables (see: Top 10 healthcare wearables to watch). The reason for this is that personal devices (e.g., iPads, mobile phones) are well understood by the Big Tech companies, certainly Apple, and they know how to market them to consumers. What they probably do not understand is the mindset of healthcare executives and their general lack of understanding of IT accompanied by their continuing insistence on control of patient options. The attraction of selling wearables to healthcare consumers is that the latter will, in time, begin to lobby aggressively for integration of healthcare data into hospital databases. Hospitals executives, in collaboration with EHR executives, have been in a "go slow" mode regarding interoperability of EHR databases and the integration of external data into them. When patients begin to lobby aggressively for such changes, it will be harder for the hospital executives to say no.
I'm torn by one of your comments in this post. When you say "We all know that healthcare organizations are sitting on a mountain of data", does that data really belong to the healthcare organizations, or to the people who's medical records comprise that data? Just last week you posted about our health records not belonging to us, so do we really want Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc to get "free" access to our records to mine/use for their use/profit? I would have no problem sharing my health record with a non profit that was aggregating data to improve the health of others, but not with those purely interested in making a profit from it...
Posted by: Bill Grolly | January 04, 2018 at 11:31 AM