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Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care
- jelliclesfarm 4y agoDo they have any wearables startups?
- midislack 4y agoAs somebody who's been blacklisted by Google for no particular reason I can even discover, this terrifies me. I'm not saying they'd hire a hit man and kill me, but tweaking some doses of medicines? This isn't impossible if they get their claws into health care. It's free and easy. And Google is terrible for privacy and has major security problems which are endemic.
- helloworld11 4y agoSo, if you thought it was shitty when your Gmail service abruptly gets suspended for no clear reason or means of recourse, imagine how wonderful it's going to be when your entire range of cloud based medical services and remotely updated internal gizmos goes down the drain because some algorithm decided so....
- m15i 4y agohttps://archive.ph/kQVpU https://archive.ph/kQVpU
- 1024core 4y agoThank you. I had to scroll all the way down to find your link. These comments should be pinned to the top. /u/dang , can you work your magic?
- scifibestfi 4y agoGoogle offers a lot of free services. Can they figure out how to make healthcare free?
- suture 4y agoAssuming by free you mean universal coverage that is (almost) free at the point of usage then this is a solved problem. What the United States lacks in order to realize a solution is political willpower and an electorate that is savvy enough to know that wanting such a system does not make one a communist. (And that being a communist does not make one an evil person.)
- refurb 4y agoCanada has "free" universal healthcare, but to call it a "solved problem" seems pretty naive.
- bruce511 4y agoIt's a solved problem in the sense that it exists, and works[1] and it is available in a lot more places than Canada. [1] "works" is an interesting point because it isn't clearly defined, and usually means different things to different people. Ever experience of the system is "unique" - there is this mix of human patient with human provider with finite resources with medical knowledge with time. So there are plenty of examples of long waits, bad service, unfavorable outcomes, even death. It's not hard to cherry pick bad experiences here. No health system will make everyone live forever. Death comes to us all sooner or late. But universal healthcare works in many places in raising the overall standard of public health, without bankrupting people in the process. Given that its always spending limited money, and only scales at human rates, its far from perfect. But, at least for some, its better than a "health care level based on your wealth" system.
- refurb 4y agoBut the US isn't "healthcare based on your wealth". You have Medicaid for the poor, heavily subsidized Obamacare for the people who don't get it through their employer (hello $100/month plan!) and Medicare for the retired. I mean my cousin in the US whose kid has cystic fibrosis get better care through Medicaid than our other cousin in Canada who can't even get access to the latest drugs.
- thr0wawayf00 4y agoHow incredible would it be if Alphabet spent, say 1% of their total healthcare venture budget, just running models on all of the different ways that the cost of healthcare could be reduced and access to care could increase. And maybe they do this already (we have no idea if they do, it might be nice to share that information if they did). It's just become so clear that many people believe the anti-science stuff that gets thrown around these days because they can't even afford to participate in the healthcare system anymore. And who can blame them? Figuring out how to get medical records systems to talk to each other isn't going to solve this problem. But no, let's throw billions of dollars at anti-aging instead...
- jdminhbg 4y ago"Running models" can't fix problems that are political conflicts between competing interests. You don't need DeepMind to tell you Certificate of Need laws reduce access and increase price; you need a political coalition that can overturn them.
- HWR_14 4y agoRunning models is literally the way to satisfy the Certificate of Need. It's the way to fix the problem.
- metadat 4y agoPlease explain further, this makes no sense to me.
- nopenopenopeno 4y agoYou are not alone.
- HWR_14 4y agoThe certificate of need is literally based on a justification for why those government subsidized hospital beds aren't wasteful. The way to demonstrate that is with a model. A better/cheaper model is the way to go there. Therefore, an AI that generates good models is valuable.
- Apocryphon 4y ago> In 2021 America’s five tech behemoths collectively spent more than $3bn on speculative health-care bets And there’s even more giants: https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/10/23162503/oracle-cerner-health-records-data-interoperability https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/10/23162503/oracle-cerner-he... https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/oracle-cerner-plan-build-national-medical-records-database-ellison-pitches-bold-vision https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/oracle-cerner-p...
- metadat 4y agoDon't forget Oracle dropping 20+ Billie to acquire Cerner.
- Apocryphon 4y agoThat’s what those two links are exactly about, yes.
- GoOnThenDoTell 4y agoPlease no. They have too much info on everyone already
- systemvoltage 4y agoStep 1) Allow Gov to build up regulations so complex that it requires a force of nature to over come. Step 2) Big Tech builds technology around those regulations and sells it to people. Step 3) Viola! we have a giant massive ocean-like moat that surrounds the Big Gov + Big Tech castle. Never to be breached by the likes of Silicon Valley startups or otherwise. We are already in a dystopian time.
- tchvil 4y agoI see it frequently here... I suppose it comes from French. Viola means rape(il la viola) or break the law(il viola la loi). The real one is voilà! And dropping the accent, is apparently acceptable in English. Voila! ;)
- jholman 4y agoBecause we're writing in English, "viola" is neither rape nor lawbreaking, though "violate" can mean either of those. In English, "viola" is the name of a stringed instrument. Voila, behold a viola! One fourth of a string quartet! But if you're irked by "viola", it could be worse, they could have written "wallah", which is all too frequent.
- na85 4y agoCan't wait to get banned from healthcare with no recourse unless I'm lucky enough to frontpage HN. Sarcasm aside I can't think of a company I'd trust less than Alphabet (maybe Meta) with managing healthcare.
- bergenty 4y agoI disagree. Alphabet values human life. Sure they may kill products constantly but I trust the company to uphold certain values, especially around humanistic principles.
- jjulius 4y ago>... but I trust the company to uphold certain values, especially around humanistic principles. You mean like, "Don't be evil"? /s
- 8organicbits 4y agoWhat makes you believe that?
- moomoo11 4y agoThanks I needed the laugh.
- i5heu 4y agoAhhh they "values human life" thats why they developed killer drones in the past I guess. [0] And that's why they censored the web via the Project "Project Dragonfly"? [1] Never forget that you are a product for Google, and Google likes to kill it's products. [0] https://theintercept.com/2018/05/31/google-leaked-emails-drone-ai-pentagon-lucrative/ https://theintercept.com/2018/05/31/google-leaked-emails-dro... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)
- unrealhoang 4y agoYou trust the current companies that made up the current healthcare situation in the US more?
- pottertheotter 4y agoWalmart is too. They’re opening up health clinics.
- paulmd 4y agoAs someone who worked in this area: > Google is also giving health records another whirl. The new initiative, called Care Studio, is aimed at doctors rather than patients. Google’s earlier efforts in this area were derailed in part by hospitals’ sluggishness in digitising their patient records. Not just digitizing but also in sharing them. Hospital systems are very very reluctant to send out a copy of their records, or even to let you query their system. Especially in the early days of EHRs there was very much a sense that it was their data and they didn't want to let data out because interoperability was a threat to their data moats. That's good in a privacy sense, but it really did slow down adoption of interoperability initiatives. Finally Medicare/Medicaid basically forced it iirc... if you want Medicare dollars you will send Medicare your encounter data. So now you have to code your records at least good enough to at least get your medicare reimbursements. > That problem has mostly gone away but another has emerged, says Karen deSalvo, Google’s health chief—the inability of different providers’ records to talk to each other. Dr de Salvo has been vocal about the need for greater interoperability since her days in the Obama administration, where she was in charge of co-ordinating American health information technology. Until that happens, Care Studio is meant to act as both translator and repository (which is, naturally, searchable). Dead on. It's a hard hard problem though because during the early days we went through a Cambrian explosion in data diversity. Data is often coded very inconsistently or in ways that make it "invalid" to modern schemas. The "miracle of HL7" is basically just a fancy text format, and like the on-table records or XML documents it's still possible to code things in ways that still won't be parseable even if they're syntactially/lexically correct. There are standardized schemas (f.ex NEDSS schema) available, but they are super over-engineered for a lot of use-cases and can perform quite poorly due to excessive "anything can map to anything" design and field-table-value formats. And again, they suffer from the "there's multiple ways you could code this" thing, just using NEDSS doesn't mean you interoperate with anyone, not close. Not sure what EHRs typically have underneath but it wouldn't surprise me if they all had their own solutions too, EHR software is universally dogshit. Handling poorly-validated/normalized data from tens of thousands of facilities all doing their own things is a very tough problem, and honestly the only solution is to decentralize it a little bit, facilities have to look at their own data and see if it makes sense the way they're sending it or even if they're storing it wrong. Once it's just another record in a database, if it's not consistent and accurate it likely never will be. It'll just be yet another System-Specific-Record-Identifier in the list for that record, and since it's not coded right nobody will ever be able to read it unless it's patched by someone/some layer. Data clearinghouses are uniquely positioned to gatekeep that a little bit, and over time there are tools getting written to help various facilities validate their data and see whether it's semantically reasonable. Almost everybody has errors especially if this is their first integration, but they can be brought up to speed on their ongoing record submissions, at least. I'm sure google would love to be in charge of everyone's health data, or at least to get to see it. Commercial activity isn't notionally allowed but I wonder if HIPAA applies to aggregated data like that, they can probably set up The Business-Purpose Side with a firewall from the Gets To Make Money Querying Anonymized Data side. It's true that this is a thing where there are intellectual economies-of-scale though. If you can get to One Standard To Rule Them All and actually make it work and not suck, that's useful, everyone just agrees to adopt Google Validation Rules and a shit-ton of terrible mapping/correcting labor gets saved once people get on board. There's just also not really anyone trustworthy enough to handle being the One Giant Repository Of Health Data, Google owning it eventually ends up in massive data mining of sensitive PHI.
- cardosof 4y agoJust imagine a world where they revolutionized healthcare as they did with advertising!
- whoomp12342 4y agoI know this is tongue and cheek but seriously. Look at other things like nest... its nice and not nice at the same time.
- Rygian 4y agoEasy to imagine: patient records will now include ads for expensive drugs. Doctors can make $ on the side by referring patients to Google Pharma. Drug labs can dig a moat around their products by buying ad placements in doctors' digital prescription pads.
- thisgoodlife 4y agoI’m all for it if it means free health care.
- Rygian 4y agoNo, you keep paying the same or more.
- TuringNYC 4y agoSo ads for drugs but the product is free like Google search? Count me in. My mom spends half her social security check on medical care.
- Rygian 4y agoNot sure what you think "the product" is and how it would help your mom. The relevant part of the article is about selling you smartwatches, selling doctors software so they can share your medical history with Google, and selling you potentially better skin moisturizer. None of that will be free.
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- AtlasBarfed 4y agoWhat happened to the Amazon-BerkshireHathaway-whoever else it was superpartnership? Wasn't that like three years ago? AFAIK, crickets. ... at least it isn't facebook. Oh, sorry """Meta"""
- zxexz 4y agoHaven Healthcare - they failed. [0] [0] https://hbr.org/2021/01/why-haven-healthcare-failed https://hbr.org/2021/01/why-haven-healthcare-failed
- Finnucane 4y agoSo, another service that Google can build two different versions of, then discontinue without warning after a couple of years?
- pg_1234 4y agoIf they help break some mercenary medical monopolies along the way ... fantastic!
- airza 4y ago"We're sunsetting Google Pacemaker on December 31, 2029..."
- dontcare007 4y agoAnd cut your service with no warning and no way back...
- bluetrolliage 4y agoThis is nothing new. MSFT, Alphabet, AMZN, Oracle have all been making plays for years trying to get into the healthcare industry. It's a huge, bloated industry
- skywal_l 4y agoThis is also an heavily regulated industry in terms of patient data protection, software quality, part availability, etc. It will be interesting to see how big tech will deal with having an overbearing regulator breathing down their neck.
- abrichr 4y agoHow so in terms of software quality?
- skywal_l 4y agoThe FDA have pretty strict standards in terms of project management. Of course it depends on the "class" of the medical device we are talking about. But if the software is used for diagnostics, you will need a whole battery of controls (test, documentation, processes, etc).
- h2odragon 4y agoForm outside observation; their software is required to suck by itself, and rely on decade old versions of other software as well. That may not have been the intent of regulation but (as so often happens) appears to have been the outcome.
- nightski 4y agoI really wish Google would just accept it's a dumb advertising company and forget about these moonshots. It's just to stroke the founders ego. They are big enough. Pay out a huge dividend or something.
- AlwaysRock 4y agoI know right? I wish they would just focus on making money instead of making products people might use and gain benefit from.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pmoriarty 4y agoI wish it would just go out of business entirely, but I'm afraid Google doesn't care what either of us wishes.
- actuator 4y agoCompletely disagree. There is huge scope in healthcare for automation, pre-emptive diagnosis and raising the bar for precision. It is mostly going to be done by a company with good AI chops, I would put my money on Google, from what I have heard about their efforts.
- nightski 4y agoGoogle often has terrible execution when it lies outside their direct core businesses. You are correct they have amazing engineering talent, but that is not the problem here.
- esotericimpl 4y agoThe issue here is not "engineering talent" The current hodge podge of Health care apps, web sites and and insurance systems all work correctly. The business logic is broken.
- philistine 4y agoI don’t understand these drives. The US is the only developed country without state control of healthcare. How is Google hoping to grow their market outside the US when it’s such a difficult space to navigate?
- dekhn 4y agoMedicare, which is under state control, is larger than many other developed country's state-run medical systems. Before criticizing the US system, make a strong attempt to understand the underlying structure.
- 908B64B197 4y ago> How is Google hoping to grow their market outside the US when it’s such a difficult space to navigate? That just means that for a given region there's only one buyer to deal with.
- Symmetry 4y agoThe US is a big outlier in not having universal healthcare but in terms of government control it's really pretty typical with countries like the UK where the government runs health provision directly rather than just regulating and paying for it are the exception rather than the rule. I've worked for a company selling robots to French hospitals and that really isn't any different than selling to US hospitals.
- zasdffaa 4y agoI'm in the UK so that somewhat limits relevance but there are efforts to make available my data to companies, I opted out of data sharing from my GP. Link is here if you want https://www.nhs.uk/using-the-nhs/about-the-nhs/sharing-your-health-records/ https://www.nhs.uk/using-the-nhs/about-the-nhs/sharing-your-... A few points: I'm not against data mining at all, just handing it out to agencies without my say so. I'd be happy for it to be used for this purpose entirely within the NHS but that's not what was assured. I don't like the approach that you have to opt out, not opt in. I others may have different tradeoffs, that's fine. This is my view and urge people not to follow what I've done but to decide for themselves. It's your data, if you're in the UK, you can make a choice (not making a choice IS making a choice: for it to be shared). Edit: and please don't respond with "just you wait..." or "it's going to happen anyway" defeatist juvenile posts.
- mastazi 4y agoIn Australia we have a similar mechanism, I opted out of sharing my health data. However down under when you opt out, this applies not only to private companies but also to State and Federal health providers. Source https://www.digitalhealth.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/my-health-record/which-organisations-use-my-health-record https://www.digitalhealth.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/my...