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How Big Tech is Getting Involved in Your Health Care (bendbulletin.com)
Apple's financing a study to see whether irregular heart rhythms can be detected with an Apple Watch. But that's just the beginning, according to a New York Times article shared by Templer421:
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 startups. 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, a research firm that tracks venture capital and startups.
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. There's no shortage of hype," said Dr. Eric Topol, a digital medicine expert who directs the Scripps Translational Science Institute in San Diego. "We're in the early stages of learning these tools: Who do they help? Who do they not help? Who do they provide just angst, anxiety, false positives?"
The article notes Amazon's investment in cancer-detection startup Grail, Apple's investment in the Beddit sleep monitor, and Alphabet's acquistion of Senosis Health, "a developer of apps that use smartphone sensors to monitor certain health signals."
Alphabet also has a research unit developing tools to collect health data, and it's already financed "Project Baseline," in which 10,000 volunteers have agreed to testing of their blood, mental health, and DNA, as well as monitoring of their skin temperature, heart rate, and sleep patterns.
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. There's no shortage of hype," said Dr. Eric Topol, a digital medicine expert who directs the Scripps Translational Science Institute in San Diego. "We're in the early stages of learning these tools: Who do they help? Who do they not help? Who do they provide just angst, anxiety, false positives?"
The article notes Amazon's investment in cancer-detection startup Grail, Apple's investment in the Beddit sleep monitor, and Alphabet's acquistion of Senosis Health, "a developer of apps that use smartphone sensors to monitor certain health signals."
Alphabet also has a research unit developing tools to collect health data, and it's already financed "Project Baseline," in which 10,000 volunteers have agreed to testing of their blood, mental health, and DNA, as well as monitoring of their skin temperature, heart rate, and sleep patterns.
I don't want any of these parasitic corporations sticking their greedy hands into healthcare.
As soon as an Uber for health care arises, I'm downloading the app.
betting that its core business strengths could ultimately improve people's health -- or at least make health care more efficient
For a lot of tech companies, core strengths primarily include raping customers for their data. And then apply "AI" to turn that data into "insights" that they can sell to other companies keen on raping those customers some more. Sounds like a great fit for health care.
Maybe that's a bit cynical. But medical data is something to be particularly careful with, and a lot of these tech companies don't exactly have a great track record of respecting privacy.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Hillary Was Going To Save It.
Bahahahahahahahahaha!
A big problem, Medical tech market stinks, monopolies, no real standards that work 100%, no open source, no real interconnectivity that works well.
They still use fax in many places its so bad.
We got the big monopoly megacorp EPIC that uses its per user fee and dominance as a stranglehold on medical records. Not part of a network, ok, we can FAX you the information. WTF...
The reason the US pays so much, we have too many middle men that are charging for everything rising the costs, there's no low cost open source solutions for everything, but the companies use TONS of opensource middle themselves.
A leading cause for expensive software, government regulations have to be devloped into existing medical software. If you pass a bill, that costs is going somewhere, new revisions, some vendors own most of the market, book, expensive upgrades, end user is gonna pay for it with higher medical insurance paying for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
TIL, Medical IT is a shitshow of closed source, over regulation and monopolies that are making everything expensive thats driving up costs.
... is that it drags along Big Marketing's involvement. The Big Tech companies are not in this in order to help people, but to open up a new data collection stream, and subsequently a new revenue stream. This would be a great idea if I could trust Big tech with my health data but, as Microsoft has shown with Windows 10, Big Tech is more interested in aggressive data collection than customer privacy..
I asked my dentist (who's heavily involved in medical/dental research at Tufts) about health research, and he noted that health care has a lot of diagnostic techniques that can't be used.
He explained that the insurance companies are afraid the new diagnostics will turn up problems in people that otherwise wouldn't be found until they're too late to fix and that, actuarially speaking, it's cheaper to let the problems go on and let the patient die. Also, it's possible the patient would die from random chance before the condition is found.
I have no idea if this is correct, but I can remember lots of "promising new" techniques and devices here on slashdot and other places over the years - yet the last new device that we actually got is the MRI.
(And for the longest time your insurance company wouldn't pay for an MRI - even though it was in widespread use - because it was deemed "experimental".)
... like sending all those goddamn faxes....
Hillary Was Going To Save It.
No, Hillary told us that the destructive fiasco that is the ACA was just fine as it was, and she would do everything necessary to keep it as it was. Of course she was just pandering to the demographic (generally Democrat voters) who are on the receiving end of that massive tax-and-transfer law, so it's hardly surprising that she'd continue telling the lies that got it passed in the first place. It's a financial disaster, exactly as it was designed to be. It had nothing whatsoever to do with health care, let alone actually providing any or making it in some way less expensive. It was simply a way to tax higher-earning people and distribute that money to likely Democrat voters. Nothing more or less. The presumption was that it was going to help the Democrats hold power. Of course it immediately cost them the legislature and the good will of millions of people who saw their premiums do exactly what the law's opponents said would happen.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The average American's headlong rush to have their every step, tic, twitch, friend, activity, and Web search monitored by big corporations, is going to make it so that NOBODY can get health insurance without signing up for 24/7 monitoring of every fart, belch, heart flutter, and midnight snack. Stick a fork in Privacy's ass and turn it over, 'cause it's falling-off-the-bone done, courtesy of folks who are too stupid to have a clue of where their own TRUE self-interest resides. Fuck me gently with a chainsaw - it'd be kinder than seeing myself sold down the river by a bunch of bleating sheep masquerading as humans. Christ, even the button I'm about to click on is telling me to Submit!
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Fixed it for you:
Businesses were likely to get backed, but only if they collected a lot of user data and had a lock in.
Venture Capitalists, the "investors", don't give 1 sh!t about improving lives, they only care about making money. Case and points: The VC's the purchased the rights to the blindness gene therapy shot - $1 million for the treatment. Because, they figure they deserve a percentage of how much more you will earn by not being blind .... or the VC's that purchased the rights for the leukemia shot.. that's right a shot that cures leukemia - can be yours for $700K.. It's important to note that most people have lifetime maximum of $1m or $2m on their health care policies. So really 1 treatment of either of these and it wipes out your health care usage for the rest of your life.
Or what about Elizabeth Holmes & Theranos... she doesn't care about lives, only making hers better with regard to fame and fortune - no matter who gets hurt.
No, the trend is investment backed health care the requires enormous profits. The US will soon be a country of heath for the wealth only.
Aw, unlucky you, you should really come to the US! Here, we may not have as many physicians (about 1/3 fewer) per capita as you have in Sweden, but we compensate for this through many innovative techniques:
(1) The uninsured and the underinsured can’t afford to clog our healthcare system, which frees precious resources for the better endowed.
(2) The shorter life expectancy (about 3 years less than Sweden) ensures that those pesky always-ill seniors won’t waste our trained personnel’s time.
(3) The higher infant mortality rate (double that of Sweden) ensures that the weaklings (who would be a drain on the system) are culled early, further optimising efficiency.
(4) High throughput: your appointment with a physician will typically result in you not seeing an actual physician (merely a nurse, or perhaps a physician assistant, if you’re lucky). If you’re extremely lucky, the physician may stop by for a minute or two on his way to the bathroom. However, do not fear, you will have plenty of quality time to go through the financial paperwork with our abundant financial office staff.
(5) In spite of this, you may still experience some abnormally long waiting list, due to your insistence on using one of the select few providers that your private health insurance provider requires you to use to remain eligible for partial reimbursement of costs. But, no worries! Here, there is freedom of choice and you are always welcome to choose any other healthcare provider and paying out of your own pocket (and it may be as inexpensive as just about twice what one would pay in Sweden, if one had to pay out of pocket in Sweden!).
No, Hillary told us that the destructive fiasco that is the ACA was just fine as it was, and she would do everything necessary to keep it as it was.
She actually said that the ACA was okay but we could make it better.
When the ACA passed, conservatives said it would kill jobs, raise the deficit, cover fewer people, have death panels, and collapse on its own. Liberals said it would not affect jobs, not raise the deficit, cover many more people, not get between a doctor and patent, and work well.
Notice that the conservatives were wrong on every point. I mean, it's easy to be correct sometimes and wrong sometimes, but to be WRONG EVERY SINGLE TIME is pretty impressive.
Even now, despite many efforts to kill the ACA, it keeps on limping along, and conservatives cannot come up with a single idea to improve it except for "let's take health care away from our base! WIN!!" Trump is the weakest, most impotent president we've had in the last 100 years, but he did do one thing that Obama never could: he made the ACA popular!
Back to TFA: I don't know which of these attempts to use technology to improve health will work. Maybe all, maybe none, but I suspect that the "analyze big data" approach will be most successful in the long run. Maybe not to improve individual results so much, but it can help determine causal factors and the effectiveness of treatments far better than current meta-studies can.
When it comes to life expectancy, Cuba is on par with US, but spending 3 time less money for health. I am not sure the fix for US is to add more greedy mega-corporations to the system.
The preventative care measures in particular would do just that over time
Sure, but of course you don't get to USE such things. Because all of your monthly disposable income is now consumed by your 500% higher premiums, preventing you from having any money to spend at a doctor's office. Because even after you spend a fortune every month for ACA-compliant insurance, your deductible also went up by several hundred percent, and so a typical couple might have to spend close to $30,000 before they get ANY benefit from their shiny new health insurance, EVERY YEAR.
But the bill got passed because Obama promised that your monthly cost would be about the same as a mobile phone bill. That most families would save over $2500 a year. You know, complete lies. We have the team of people working for him and Reid and Pelosi on the record saying they knew that the only way the bill would pass was if they lied about the costs and benefits. Or in this case, the loss of benefits, and the crippling new costs.
Had the GOP not deliberately destablized the markets
The "markets" were state-by-state from day one. And your theory doesn't explain why solidly blue states (legislatively, and executively) have insurers fleeing and residents getting stuck with enormous increases in their premiums and deductibles. It has to be repealed so that the partisan Democrats who rammed through the first version - which is nothing but a tax-and-redistribute mechanism - might have to actually face reality instead of lying again.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I'm glad someone brought up cholesterol. High cholesterol is actually a symptom of weak blood vessel walls. Cholesterol acts as a bandaid preventing aneurysms. However, this bandaid can clog your arteries if your condition is severe. Imagine all the blood vessels in your body thinning, your body will produce large amounts of cholesterol. How do we prevent thinning of your blood vessels? By entering a weekly reminder on your PDA: less smoking, less alcohol, less sugar, more exercise, more vegetables and last but not least more Vitamin C from organic sources.
I have no interest in a connected watch product. However, should the Apple watch or a third-party watchband that connects to an Apple watch start to offer the ability to monitor my blood sugar levels 24/7 in real time ... this can't be said too strongly ... I will buy one. Period, Full Stop.
Obviously this means that the way forward for the watch products is through Health Care. It has massive potential, actually.
So, when the first big company gets sued for not properly securing their patients, **ahem**, their customers' device history (and other related data), where will the finger-pointing begin and end --I'm looking at you, Fitbit, but it may as well be newer cellphones.
I can see engineers blaming it on having to use third-party data-storage platforms... then board members claiming their company and devices are clearly not a physician or to be interpreted as one, therefore can't be liable for violating any health-related law.
But that won't help any of the people who's health profiles are there for anyone to scrutinize, whether it's a possible employer, insurance company, or the general electorate. Cue the jokes about possible scenarios...
No sig for you! Come back one year!