Lab Soft News

CMS Requires Hospitals to Post Prices for Medicare Patients; Useful Step?

It is commonly understood that hospital pricing is a mess, a topic that I have blogged about frequently in the past (see: Two Reasons Why Medical and Hospital Bills Are Such a Mess; High Deductible-Health Plans Causing Hospital Billing Problems; Coding for Hospital Services; One Reason for the High Cost of Healthcare). CMS has been trying to alleviate this problem, at least in part, by requiring hospitals to post their price lists on-line (see: Hospitals may soon have to post prices for patients online). Below is an excerpt from the article:

Hospitals may soon have to post their standard prices for patients online, under a proposed rule unveiled Tuesday by the Trump administration. Also, the administration is seeking comments on how to stop so-called surprise billing ...and how to give patients better information about the out-of-pocket costs they will face....The proposed rule is...[CMS's] latest effort to give patients more information about the cost of health care and about their own medical history so they can better direct their own care. The guidance -- part of the annual update to Medicare payment policies -- applies mainly to Medicare patients and providers, but officials expect it will influence practices across the nation's health care system. It would take effect in 2019. The posted prices, however, may not reflect the actual amount most patients pay since insurers and the government negotiate different rates and often cover a major portion of the bill....Hospitals are already required to provide either a list of their standard charges or their policies for allowing the public to view the prices. Trump officials want hospitals to post this information on the Internet and make it available in a way that third-party app developers can access. In addition, the agency said they were concerned about out-of-network bills, such as those for anesthesiologists and radiologists who work at in-network hospitals, and by facility and physician fees for emergency room visits that come as a surprise to patients. 

This requirement by CMS will not solve hospital billing problems overnight because, as noted above, insurers and Medicare negotiate different rates with hospitals. However, there are a couple of points in the article that give some reason for optimism. The first is that making hospital prices available on-line may encourage third-party app developers to provide some meaningful price data to Medicare patients receiving services from a particular hospital. Also important is that CMS is investigating "surprise" out-of-network fees. These ofter are for the services of anesthesiologists and radiologists as well as facility fees charged for ER visits. Here is a brief description of out-of-network fees copied from the web site of Blue Cross of Michigan (see: What’s the difference between in network and out of network?) :

When a provider joins our network, they agree to accept our approved amount for their services. For example, a doctor may charge $150 for a service. Our approved amount is $90. So as a Blue Cross member, you save $60. On your claims and explanation of benefits statements, you’ll see these savings listed as a discount. Doctors or hospitals who aren’t in our network don’t accept our approved amount. You’ll be responsible for paying the difference between the provider’s full charge and your plan’s approved amount. That’s called balance billing.

Additionally, here's a description of ER facility fees (see: Emergency rooms are monopolies. Patients pay the price.):

There are 141 million visits to the emergency room each year, and nearly all of them (including Saifan’s) have a charge for something called a facility fee. This is the price of walking through the door and seeking service. It does not include any care provided....[T]here is...wide variation in how much hospitals charge for these fees, raising questions about how they are set and how closely they are tethered to overhead costs. Most hospitals do not make these fees public. Patients typically learn what their emergency room facility fee is when they receive a bill weeks later. The fees can be hundreds or thousands of dollars....[Vox] found that the price of...[facility] fees rose 89 percent between 2009 and 2015 — rising twice as fast as the price of outpatient health care, and four times as fast as overall health care spending.

Digital Front Doors Versus Physical Front Doors in Healthcare; Hospitals Lagging

Vince Kuraitis of Better Health Technologies made a very important point with a recent series of Tweets. He proposed the interesting idea that hospitals are providing patients with physical front doors but were lagging in providing digital front doors. Below are his comments suggesting that hospital digital front doors currently consist of often inadequate patient portals but that the leadership of most hospitals are "clueless" about a broader set of digital services. He provides six reasons to explain why they have ceded patient portal leadership:

Delivery systems have had (and still have) the ability to control their "digital front doors" through PATIENT PORTALS. To date, however, most are clueless. Tomorrow's portals will be comprehensive, broad, user-friendly. Who will own them?

• IDSs have many reasons to rationalize ceding patient portal leadership:
  • Don't have the capital, and/or prefer to spend elsewhere
  • Don't have the experience/staff
  • Learning curve too steep
  • More important priorities
  • Tech is immature

I have also commented in the past that hospitals are not investing time and resources in patient portals (see: Patients Often Lukewarm about Patient Portals; Problems with Training?). My own view on this problem is that physicians and hospital executives, despite their best efforts, don't really have a deep understanding of consumerism in healthcare. Regarding patient appetite for information, they have offered various versions of patient portals that were designed by their EHR vendors. The latter may be as ill-suited as hospital personnel to develop such products in a manner that satisfies patient needs.

A number of prestigious hospitals are now working with Apple to launch Apple Health Records using hospital EHR data (see: Could Apple Be Trying to Develop a "Patient Portal" for the iPhone?; Apple reveals 39 hospitals to launch Apple Health Records). I believe that there is some risk for hospital in this collaboration. The risk, put bluntly, is that Apple and similar IT companies will eventually "own" the most successful digital front doors to use Vince's terminology. If you have doubts about Apple's deep understanding of consumers' needs and desires then you have never been inside an Apple store. Digital front doors in healthcare will inevitably become more important as many services migrate from hospital professionals (i.e., physical front doors) to consumer choice and control.

Uber Launches Uber Health; Responding to Needs of Clinical Trial Subjects

A recent article about Uber Health addressed a number of the features that will be available with this transportation service. I found the details interesting in terms of what Uber perceives as an important niche in the healthcare sector (see: Uber Launches Uber Health, Looks To Improve Patient Experience In Clinical Research) Below is an excerpt from the article:

...Uber, is looking to expand their outreach to the clinical research community with the launch of Uber Health, a new dashboard the company hopes will remove transportation as a barrier to proper care. Using Uber Health, doctors and hospitals will be able to arrange rides for their patients even if the patient hasn’t downloaded the Uber app or does not have a smart phone....Uber Health will address a growing need in the clinical research industry, the company believes....“ In the clinical trial space in particular, we have heard over and over again that recruitment and retention are major issues, to the extent where transportation is a burden and ultimately a barrier for trial retention” ...[an Uber spokesman] said.....Currently Uber Health is leveraging all of Uber’s 750,000 US drivers, a choice...[that will] put focus on the reliability of the service....Another focus for Uber Health was limiting the amount of effort on the patient’s part to order the rides. All of the steps from ordering to paying for the ride (which can be handled as either part of the patient’s bill or the organization’s budget) are handled by the healthcare organization....Uber Health is not an ambulance service....Uber Health is available in two versions. As a standard web-based dashboard, hospitals and clinical trial sites can use Uber Health to arrange transportation for instant pickup or schedule for up to 30 days before their patient’s scheduled appointment. Uber Health also offers API functionality for the service, giving partners and customers the option to take all the capabilities of arranging transportation and building out their current technology to include these capabilities.

Of interest to me concerning Uber Health is that rides can be ordered and paid for by the medical provider as opposed to the patient. Particular reference is made to "the clinical trial space" where transportation may be important to subject "recruitment and retention." A number of articles have been published about barriers to clinical trial subject recruitment and retention (see, for example: Subject Recruitment and Retention: Barriers to Success). A shortage of subjects is particularly acute trial for immunotherapy drugs (see: A Cancer Conundrum: Too Many Drug Trials, Too Few Patients). It thus appears from this article that Uber Health will be courting the clinical trial transportation business. Clearly indisputable is that having arranged transportation for research subjects with expenses covered by the clinical trial budget is a very sensible approach to reducing at least one of the barriers that face research subjects. 

Uber also seems to be well aware that some potential customers will not have access to the Uber Health app due to a lack of a smart phone or unfamiliarity with cell phone apps. Such individuals will be accommodated by Uber Health with all steps being managed by the health organization personnel. Nevertheless, the patient will still be informed about the status of a ride by text or telephone when the transportation is booked and at the time of pick-up. Uber Health also emphasizes in its web site that it's not an ambulance service although available on a 24-hour basis. Clearly, this is an important qualifier because I am sure that drivers don't have any special medical training. However, I suspect that some people in need to hospital care and without transportation may use Uber Health services for transportation to hospitals and ERs. This may be a good choice if an illness is not severe given the cost of ambulance services.

Short-Term Solutions to Correct the Known EHR Problems Will Be Insufficient

In a recent article about the defects of the EHR in the Harvard Business Review, there was a passage that briefly but directly summarized many of the problems of current EHRs (see: To Combat Physician Burnout and Improve Care, Fix the Electronic Health Record). Note that the title of the article suggested that these EHR fixes were necessary in order to partly correct physician burn-out. Below is that passage:

The EHR is a lot more than merely an electronic version of the patient’s chart. It has also become the control panel for managing the clinical encounter through clinician order entry. Moreover, through billing and regulatory compliance, it has also become a focal point of quality-improvement efforts. While some of these efforts actually have improved quality and patient safety, many others served merely to “buff up the note” to make the clinician look good on “process” measures, and simply maximize billing. Mashing up all these functions — charting, clinical ordering, billing/compliance and quality improvement — inside the EHR has been a disaster for the clinical user, in large part because the billing/compliance function has dominated.

The pressure from angry physician users has produced a medieval solution: Hospital and clinics have hired tens of thousands of scribe sliterally to follow clinicians around and record their notes and orders into the EHR. Only in health care, it seems, could we find a way to “automate” that ended up adding staff and costs!  As bad as the regulatory and documentation requirements are, they are not the largest problem. The electronic systems hospitals have adopted at huge expense are fronted by user interfaces out of the mid-1990s: Windows 95-style screens and dropdown menus, data input by typing and navigation by point and click. These antiquated user interfaces are astonishingly difficult to navigate. Clinical information vital for care decisions is sometimes entombed dozens of clicks beneath the user-facing pages of the patient’s chart.

I predict that anyone who has worked in the current hospital environment will understand that it will be impossible to quickly solve the problems of the EHR described in the quote above. I blogged three years ago about why I thought the EHR model is unsustainable (see: Ten Reasons Why the Current Hospital EHR Model Is Unsustainable). Here is my updated set of reasons for such a statement:

• The major companies providing EHRs exercise a near-monopoly in the market and it will be difficult, if not impossible, to provide incentives for them to extensively modify their systems in the short term as long as they continue to sell their product (see: Epic, Cerner hold majority of EHR market share in acute care hospitals).
• Major hospital CEOs will not be publicly quoted as being critical of their EHRs so there is no spirited and significant dialogue about them. This is, at least in part, the result of the "gag clauses" that are part of EHR contracts (see: Gag Clauses in EHR Contracts Documented; Concerns Raised about Patient Safety). 
• Today's EHRs are complex, multifunctional, layered products that have evolved over years. They are monolithic and not easily modified excerpt by a series of small incremental steps the won't change their overall quality.
• EHRs are inefficient but mission critical for hospitals so their physicians and nurses will not tolerate any significant system changes even though they would ostensibly be intended to improve efficiency. Hospitals executives will thus only publicly lobby for gradual incremental changes if even that.
• Because of quirks and vagaries of healthcare reimbursement, health system executives have little deep understanding of their cost structures. Hence, arguments that inefficient EHR software has a drastic effect on the efficiency of their key professional workforce (i.e., physician and nurses) tends not to motivate them (see: Two Reasons Why Medical and Hospital Bills Are Such a Mess; Many Hospitals Struggle to Understand Their Own Cost Data).
• In order to solve this EHR inefficiency problem, and as noted above, hospitals will continue to hire scribes as one corrective measure to offload the workload improved upon them by their problematic EHRs (see: The growth of medical scribes and what it means for healthcare). In short, hospital executives will throw money at this problem and thereby continue to inexorably increase the cost of hospital care.
• With the advent of electronic home monitoring and health wearables, some consumer-generated data will be uploaded to hospital EHR databases. Unknown at this time is how such data acquisition by hospitals will be compensated. And yet, the net results will be to make EHR databases even larger and more unwieldy. 

I also suggest here that it would be illogical to anticipate new entrants in the EHR market who would compete with the incumbent EHR vendors. Tech giants like Apple and Amazon will operate only at the margins and in the consumer-oriented and evolving fields. There will thus be no "white knights" that will enter the EHR market with an efficient, cloud-based solution. Instead and because of other significant changes in healthcare delivery, hospitals will continue to lose business and money, particularly in the ambulatory care sector and also for remunerative surgical procedures like knee and hip replacement, imaging, and lab testing (see: Tug of War between Hospitals and Surgicenters for Knee Replacements). Smaller hospitals will increasingly become insolvent and go out of business. Giant health systems will be declared "too big to fail" despite their extremely high cost structures. Hospitals services will become even more costly but probably borne by health insurance companies for the increasingly rare instances when hospitalization becomes necessary.

A Strategy for Optimizing Beaker Functionality: Leveraging the Hospital C-Suite

I am reconciled to the fact that many pathology departments will be running Epic's LIS, Beaker. Hospital executives continue to seek an enterprise wide solution to support their hospital IT needs. After perhaps selecting Epic's EHR, they will often gravitate to Beaker for their LIS. Beaker has added sufficient functionality such that it now can be described as a satisfactory choice in the face of pressure from the C-suite. Beaker can thus be described as a generic LIS. It will never achieve the status of a best-of-breed LIS because there is no need for Epic to improve it to the highest functionality level. Epic's core business is its EHR. It's not possible, nor even necessary, for the company to extensively develop its departmental modules. 

Another reason why Beaker will never achieve all of the functionality required by sophisticated pathology departments is the rapidity of scientific discovery in the fields of molecular pathology, genomics, and digital pathology. In order to meet this LIS functionality vacuum, new specialized software companies will inevitably arise to meet the needs not supplied by Beaker. Pathology departments running Beaker will need to purchase a number of such specialized laboratory software products but will then require a system integrator on the lab side to knit together the information output of their installed specialized systems that will then be interfaced to Beaker and the EHR for reporting. There is currently no provider of such integration services fo pathology departments. 

On the hospital-side, system integration requirements are being met by Epic. Specialized software companies must decide whether to participate in the Epic ecosystem. I have previously discussed this ecosystem in relation to the deployment of a lab rules product developed by Mayo and National Decision Support that is installed on the hospital side (see: Rule-Based Decision Support Tools Available on LISs for Decades; Lab Rules Firing at the Time of Test Order; Possible on the LIS?). The advantage of this ecosystem from Epic's perspective is that it has control over all of these specialized software companies and can also take contractual measures to avoid poaching of its employees by other companies. 

I doubt whether Epic would have any interest in developing ecosystems in pathology similar to those on the hospital side because its culture is based on a centralized IT model. Another reason for lack of interest on the part of Epic in developing a pathology ecosystem is that it would be a tacit admission that Beaker lacked desired functionalities. However, Epic could theoretically be forced to allow interfaces of specialized pathology products to Beaker but only on the basis of extreme pressure from client hospital C-Suites. Therefore, the only way to force Epic to permit specialized software vendors on the pathology side is by such leveraging. Initial responsibility for this rests with leadership of the pathology departments.

Continued Growth of Personal Genomics with a PerkinElmer/Helix Collaboration

Genomic testing is beginning to explode in the consumer marketplace. The phenomenon started with DNA analysis for those interested in their family lineage and is now proceeding to diagnostics such as the determination of selected variants of BRCA1/BRCA 2. This is only one of the analytes included in the genetic risk report of 23andMe (see: Do You Speak BRCA). Now comes the news that PerkinElmer, a well established IVD company, is collaborating with Helix to offer personal genomic testing to consumers (see: PerkinElmer Collaborates With Helix To Drive Innovation In Exome-Based Personal Genomics). Below is an excerpt from the article announcing this news:

PerkinElmer has announced a collaboration with Helix to develop and commercialize exome sequencing-based tests that will empower consumers to make proactive health management decisions. Tests developed as part of this collaboration will be available to customers of Helix’s expanding online marketplace for DNA-powered products, which were utilized in Helix’s collaboration with Illumina Accelerator last fall. The initial targeted product offering will return results for 59 genes that the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) identifies as highly penetrant genetic conditions with established interventions aimed at significantly reducing morbidity and mortality. All DNA sequencing data for these products will be generated utilizing Helix’s proprietary Exome+ assay in its CLIA- and CAP-certified next-generation sequencing laboratory.

PerkinElmer Genomics’ medical genetics team, under the direction of Madhuri Hegde,....will provide data analysis and interpretative services to individuals who purchase the product. ....PerkinElmer Genomics has built a proprietary reporting pipeline called Ordered Data Interpretation Network which will help make data analysis and interpretation much more efficient than standard methods....All product offerings will be available through Helix’s online store and will require clinician approval. Expanded offerings involving additional genes and whole exome analysis are also planned for development in the future. Unlike other personal genomics companies that require a separate DNA sample for each product they provide, Helix collects and sequences a DNA sample once, and then securely stores and protects a customer’s exome data so they can access additional DNA-powered products and services from the Helix store without providing another saliva sample....The products offered by PerkinElmer Genomics through the Helix store are designed for healthy individuals who do not have known risk factors for inherited disease. 

This is all extremely interesting. One point to emphasize is that the analysis and interpretation of DNA data is being managed by PerkinElmer rather than Helix using what is described as their "proprietary reporting pipeline." I can't find any details about this but will be on the hunt for more information. Also very interesting is the notion that Helix collects and sequences a saliva sample only once. This means that this effort is focused on both DNA testing and subsequent data analysis. In other words, the companies will provide future reports based on new science as it evolves. The consumer thus has a continuing relationship with the companies and will presumably be able to order future reports.

Is "Curing Patients" a Good Business Model for Pharma?

An interesting point was made in a recent article that the stock market may "punish" companies like Gilead Sciences which has developed a drug called Harvoni to cure hepatitis C. The supposed reason for the punishment is that the prospects for drug profits will diminish as its highly effective use continues (see: Goldman Sachs report: "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?"). Below is an excerpt from the article:

In Goldman Sachs's April 10 report, "The Genome Revolution," its analysts ponder the rise of biotech companies who believe they will develop "one-shot" cures for chronic illnesses; in a moment of rare public frankness, the report's authors ask, "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" The authors were apparently spooked by the tale of Gilead Sciences, who developed a Hepatitis C therapy that is more than 90% effective, making $12.5B in 2015 -- the year of the therapy's release -- a number that fell to $4B this year. The analysts are making a commonsense observation: capitalism is incompatible with human flourishing. Markets will not, on their own, fund profoundly effective cures for diseases that destroy our lives and families. This is a very strong argument for heavily taxing the profits of pharma companies' investors and other one percenters, and then turning the money over to publicly funded scientific research that eschews all patents, and which is made available for free under the terms of the Access To Medicines treaty (see: Innovation and Access to Medicines for Neglected Populations: Could a Treaty Address a Broken Pharmaceutical R&D System?), whereby any country that devotes a set fraction of its GDP to pharma research gets free access to the fruits of all the other national signatories.

This theory about drug profitability relating to curability can be extended to other drugs. For example, one of the reasons that statins were such a miraculous and profitable class of drugs is  they that they didn't cure a disease but were taken for life by consumers to forestall the onset of cardiovascular disease. Contrariwise, is also speculated that one of the reasons so few new antibiotics are being developed is that such drugs are usually taken over a short period of time in order to cure the patent of an infectious disease.

In my opinion and discussing the future profitability of Harvoni, I think that the drug will continue to generate good revenue for the company. The high price of the drug, roughly $70,000 per inmate for the 12-week treatment, will continue to bust the budgets of the various state correctional agencies which are debating which prison inmates to treat given its high cost (see: Hepatitis C drug costs challenge corrections budget). There may also be some Harvoni cost-cutting due to competition in the market (see: Welcome to the new world order: A competitive HCV drug marketplace). Gilead may choose to gradually lower the drug's price so it becomes more affordable until there will be few patients infected with heptitis C in the U.S. to treat. The company could then provide the drug to treat the rest of the world's population with the disease. At any rate, I don't think that pharmaceutical companies will shy away from blockbuster curative drugs because, in so doing, they will ultimately limit the sales of their product.

Register Now for the 2018 Pathology Informatics Summit, May 21-24, in Pittsburgh

It's time for all of the readers of Lab Soft News to register for the 2018 Pathology Informatics Summit that will be held in Pittsburgh on May 21-24, 2018. The lineage of this conference dates back to 1983 with an Ann Arbor conference referred to as AIMCL. The PI Summit can thus boast of a 35-year continuous history as the only national conference devoted solely to the field of pathology informatics. It's sponsored by the Association for Pathology Informatics. Browse the conference schedule and you will discover a wide variety of lectures devoted to both applied and research topics. Also pay attention to the workshops on the first day, May 21, that are included in the registration fee of the conference including the HIMA Imaging Science and International Imaging Workshop. On the evening of May 21, there is also a Digital Pathology Association companion meeting from 5:00 to 7:30 p.m. Here are details about only two of the keynote lectures to be offered. Scan the whole schedule to find more like these.

• Anil Parwani, MD, PhD, MBA: “Houston: We Have Liftoff— The Initial Experiences with US-based WSI Primary Diagnosis”
• Jeroen Van Der Laak, PhD: "Tackling the Challenges that Still Exist in Computational Pathology"

As one might expect, the 39 faculty members of the PI Summit constitute renown set of pathology informatics experts. No other conference places such a group such as this under one roof. A total of 18 vendors will also participate in the conference with some last minute additions expected. The cover a wide range of products including LISs, digital pathology including quantitative analysis, lab analytics, speech recognition, specimen labeling, and workflow automation. It is commonly understood that the two largest challenges facing pathology and lab medicine in this era of value-based care and hospital consolidation are pathology informatics and molecular/genomic diagnostics. Take advantage of the opportunity to register now for PI Summit 2018 and get up-to-speed in the latest developments in lab automation and analytics. 

Why Is U.S. Healthcare So Expensive; Administrative Costs Part of Problem

A recent long and complex article discussed the question of why the U.S. spends so much more on healthcare than similar countries (see: Why does the U.S. spend so much more on healthcare?). One of the major reasons cited is the admistrative costs of the U.S. health system with its large number of health plans, each of may have different criteria for billing and collection. Below is an excerpt from the article with an emphasis on administrative costs

Eight percent of U.S. healthcare spending went to administrative costs incurred by private and public insurers, compared with an average of 3% in the 10 other wealthy countries....That 8% figure doesn't include billing and insurance-related activities by hospitals and physician offices. Including those costs would bring the share of U.S. healthcare spending on administrative costs up to about 14%....A 2013 Health Affairs....found that administrative costs accounted for 25.3% of U.S. hospital spending in 2010, compared with 19.8% in the Netherlands, 15.5% in England, and 12.4% in Canada. For example, Minnesota-based HealthPartners employs about 200 full-time staff to handle back-end billing and collection work for its one hospital and 36 clinics and specialty locations, a HealthPartners spokesman said. In contrast, the University Health Network in Toronto, which has six hospitals including Toronto General and 1,272 beds, has just 5.5 full-time-equivalent employees handling insurance billing and patient collection activities.

I recently listened to a Deloitte webinar about the pursuit of the "no-collar" workforce in healthcare by which it was referring to robotics and automation (see: The no-collar workforce: Technology's impact on HR in health care). It occurred to me that the administrative complexity of the U.S. health system would probably not change much in the near future but perhaps administrative costs could be reduced with greater automation in the health plans (see: 7 ways to reduce administrative costs). Here's an excerpt from this article:

Automate More Functions Online: The quest to reduce administration costs has many health plans moving to more online platforms, and healthcare experts agree that automating functions can minimize traditionally labor-driven expenses. Consumers have come to expect a certain degree of self-service. "If you look at a lot of the health plan industry, it's still pretty antiquated around paper-based communications and some of this is due to regulations, but it's not a very sophisticated industry," says [a software develper]....[H]ealth plans are looking at ways to automate anything that is currently being provided via phone contact, whether it’s incorporating more self-service capabilities for members or increasing the amount of data available to providers. Over time,...moving more functionality online will not only reduce costs but will also allow health plans to leverage historic member data to deliver more tailored, customized communication.

So here is the conundrum. Administration accounts for perhaps one-quarter or more of the healthcare spend in the U.S. This percentage could be ratcheted down with greater automation but health plans, as noted in the excerpt above, are paper-bound and unsophisticated. They also have an unfortunate tendency to want to compensate their executives with enormous salaries (see: Skyrocketing salaries for health insurance CEOs). So what are the chances of greater automation among the health plans? Probably about the same as Big Pharma executives giving us all a break on the high cost of drugs.

Big Tech Is Knocking on Hospital Doors; It's All About the Data

Fortune magazine recently published a long article about the escalating interest on the part of Big Tech in the enormous cache of data controlled (managed?) by large health systems (see: Tech's Next Big Wave: Big Data Meets Biology). Below is an excerpt from it. This is only a small fraction of the article so navigate to it if you are interested in the topic:

...[T]here’s a...powerful catalyst [for Big Tech's interest in healthcare]—one so gargantuan and infinitesimal at the same time that it sounds like the answer to a riddle. And that’s data. More specifically, it’s your data: your individual biology, your health history and ever-fluctuating state of well-being, where you go, what you spend, how you sleep, what you put in your body and what comes out. The amount of data you slough off everyday—in lab tests, medical images, genetic profiles, liquid biopsies, electrocardiograms, to name just a few—is overwhelming by itself. Throw in the stuff from medical claims, clinical trials, prescriptions, academic research, and more, and the yield is something on the order of 750 quadrillion bytes every day—or some 30% of the world’s data production. These massive storehouses of information have always been there. But now, thanks to a slew of novel technologies, sophisticated measuring devices, ubiquitous connectivity and the cloud, and yes, artificial intelligence, companies can harness and make sense of this data as never before.

“It’s not the data,” says Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute. “It’s the analytics. Up until three-to-five years ago, all that data was just sitting there. Now it’s being analyzed and interpreted. It’s the most radical change happening in health care.” The quest to retrieve, analyze, and leverage that data has become the new gold rush. And a vanguard of tech titans—not to mention a bevy of hot startups—are on the hunt for it. Alphabet's....life sciences arm Verily is aiming to create a “baseline” of human health by tracking all kinds of biometric information from 10,000 volunteers...Apple just released an iPhone feature offering users in several big health systems instant access to their own medical record—an effort that joins its ongoing heart study with Stanford, testing if wearables can detect serious cardiac conditions (see: Apple Getting Traction with Its App to Access EHR Records with iPhones).

As this article makes abundantly clear, access to the mountain of health data is only the first step in the process of extracting more value from it. Analytics is the next step. Here's a definition of healthcare analytics from the Wikipedia (see: Health care analytics):

Health care analytics is a term used to describe the healthcare analysis activities that can be undertaken as a result of data collected from four areas within healthcare; claims and cost data, pharmaceutical and research and development...data, clinical data..., and patient behavior and sentiment data....Health care analytics is a growing industry in the United States, expected to grow to more than $18.7 billion by 2020. The industry focuses on the areas of clinical analysis, financial analysis, supply chain analysis, as well as, fraud and HR analysis.

I have blogged about healthcare and diagnostic analytics in the past (see, for example: Much of the Future for Pathology and Lab Medicine Rests with Analytics; Analytics May Be the Secret Sauce to Propel CVS-Aetna Forward; Eric Schmidt Discusses the Potential Value of Predictive Analytics in the ER). Regarding healthcare analytics in general and diagnostic analytics in particular, the development of these fields must take place in collaboration with the IT companies that have the special expertise to analyze the data using techniques such as deep learning, big data, and neural networks. Such a collaboration between these two parties will not be easy because of what I envision as "points of contention" that I intend to discuss in upcoming blog notes.