How Big Tech Sees in Health

Amazon

Amazon plans to shake up the prescription-drug business and health coverage, but they dominate other areas of health already

• Medical product sales (latex gloves, bed liners, specialized dental tools, medical devices) move beyond $10 billion. 
• Electronic medical records 
• Genomics researchers store and analyze vast amounts of data, ramp up processing power for trials and modeling - allowing more cost-effective tests.

Google

Google wants to help make you live longer and has moved into 

• health-insurance
• understanding the process of aging and extending life spans
• new ways to collect and use health data (contact lens that monitors glucose levels. 
• artificial-intelligence with a significant health care focus.
• Medically focused and HIPAA-compliant cloud storage, email and file-sharing products
• health-tracking apps
• “Dr. Google” where doctors help ensure common questions are answered accurately

Microsoft

Microsoft is trying to 

• sell hospitals, drugmakers and doctors software, cloud processing and artificial-intelligence services for more personalized medical care.
• speech/language recognition for a “triage bot” 
• tools for monitoring whether a patient sticks with a treatment plan
• cloud-computing harnessing the processing muscle for computing-intensive genetic analysis.
• Using machine learning to target cancer therapies
• Big data to detect cancers or other potentially fatal medical conditions earlier.

It Is Only the Beginning

While this is the beginning, and challenges lay ahead such as:

• Algorithmic technology can trigger false positives,
• Scepticism is high, and 
• Rebuilding health infrastructure takes years.



Watch this fast emerging space.