Slashdot Mirror
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.
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".)
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.
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.