4 ms·

Just imagine a world where they revolutionized healthcare as they did with advertising!

whoomp12342 4y ago
I 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 ago
Easy 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 ago
  I’m all for it if it means free health care.
  - Rygian 4y ago
    No, you keep paying the same or more.
- TuringNYC 4y ago
  So 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 ago
    Not 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.
- sargun 4y ago
  This already exists: * there are prescription management companies (middlemen) who already advertise ("recommend") to doctors * doctors no longer directly get kickbacks, because the FDA * you don't think drug companies don't already control what doctors see? https://pulsepoint.com/hcp-marketing https://pulsepoint.com/hcp-marketing * who do you think finances medicine information?
Guthur 4y ago
So, pushing treatments you didn't want or need? Yeah we're already there and they've certainly got the government connections to make it very lucrative.
- cardosof 4y ago
  I was thinking more like ad-supported hearing aids with built-in analytics so marketers can ask "Have you heard of this brand before?" for precise ad recall.
randcraw 4y ago
Google will succeed at healthcare only after medical decisions can be reduced to A/B tests. That is to say, never. After wasting many millions on failures like Calico, Google hasn't learned that healthcare is a service that's continuous, custom, and complex. And since the "customer's" health and life are at stake, maintaining health is a damned sight more important and difficult to do sufficiently well than Google's current business: spam. Tech companies like Google simply don't have the DNA or the persistence to succeed in science-based markets driven by R&D and heavy regulation. They want faster profits driven by higher multipliers and lower standards for accuracy than you can get in healthcare, where accuracy really counts and every case is a little bit different. In medicine it really matters if you get the right answer for your A/B test, otherwise someone may die or they may sue you. That's why so little of healthcare has been automated, and why that's likely to continue.
- dekhn 4y ago
  Why do you think Calico is a failure? I think the jury is still out on that one.
  - randcraw 4y ago
    I have a little experience trying to work with Google in the R&D space at a large pharma. Google and other external R&D agents consistently underestimated the difficulty in getting access to sufficient data from us to employ large scale ML. That data often exists within a pharma's clinical trials, but it's acquired and stored in a way that makes it inaccessible to subsequent mining. This is a problem for dataminers like me within pharmas too. Most of our clinical trial data is locked up contractually within contract research organizations (CROs) who are responsible for taking specific measurements of it as part of a trial. From what I've seen, dataminers within the company can gain access to only selective bits of that data (one or two features, perhaps) from all the patients in a trial, but never to all the data on each patient, and never data from the trial that spans multiple CROs. This 'federation' of clinical trial data collection serves the needs of the trial design (and satisfies HIPPA regs), but it makes mining the data or asking new questions of it almost impossible. Too little data is available (and never longitudinal longer-term outcomes, since trial durations are short) to allow mining of more than short-term signals, like immediate response to treatment. Pharmas are unlikely to change that practice, in part because it's easier to federate the analyses and allow the raw data to remain in distributed silos. But federation is also a good way to discourage asking creative yet inessential questions that might later prove awkward or invite lawsuits, since litigation is an omnipresent worry in US healthcare. How companies like Calico/Google hope to navigate such minefields is a question they have yet to answer successfully.

I 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 ago

Easy 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 ago
I’m all for it if it means free health care.
- Rygian 4y ago
  No, you keep paying the same or more.
TuringNYC 4y ago
So 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 ago
  Not 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.
sargun 4y ago
This already exists: * there are prescription management companies (middlemen) who already advertise ("recommend") to doctors * doctors no longer directly get kickbacks, because the FDA * you don't think drug companies don't already control what doctors see? https://pulsepoint.com/hcp-marketing https://pulsepoint.com/hcp-marketing * who do you think finances medicine information?

Guthur 4y ago

So, pushing treatments you didn't want or need? Yeah we're already there and they've certainly got the government connections to make it very lucrative.

cardosof 4y ago
I was thinking more like ad-supported hearing aids with built-in analytics so marketers can ask "Have you heard of this brand before?" for precise ad recall.

randcraw 4y ago

Google will succeed at healthcare only after medical decisions can be reduced to A/B tests. That is to say, never. After wasting many millions on failures like Calico, Google hasn't learned that healthcare is a service that's continuous, custom, and complex. And since the "customer's" health and life are at stake, maintaining health is a damned sight more important and difficult to do sufficiently well than Google's current business: spam. Tech companies like Google simply don't have the DNA or the persistence to succeed in science-based markets driven by R&D and heavy regulation. They want faster profits driven by higher multipliers and lower standards for accuracy than you can get in healthcare, where accuracy really counts and every case is a little bit different. In medicine it really matters if you get the right answer for your A/B test, otherwise someone may die or they may sue you. That's why so little of healthcare has been automated, and why that's likely to continue.

dekhn 4y ago
Why do you think Calico is a failure? I think the jury is still out on that one.
- randcraw 4y ago
  I have a little experience trying to work with Google in the R&D space at a large pharma. Google and other external R&D agents consistently underestimated the difficulty in getting access to sufficient data from us to employ large scale ML. That data often exists within a pharma's clinical trials, but it's acquired and stored in a way that makes it inaccessible to subsequent mining. This is a problem for dataminers like me within pharmas too. Most of our clinical trial data is locked up contractually within contract research organizations (CROs) who are responsible for taking specific measurements of it as part of a trial. From what I've seen, dataminers within the company can gain access to only selective bits of that data (one or two features, perhaps) from all the patients in a trial, but never to all the data on each patient, and never data from the trial that spans multiple CROs. This 'federation' of clinical trial data collection serves the needs of the trial design (and satisfies HIPPA regs), but it makes mining the data or asking new questions of it almost impossible. Too little data is available (and never longitudinal longer-term outcomes, since trial durations are short) to allow mining of more than short-term signals, like immediate response to treatment. Pharmas are unlikely to change that practice, in part because it's easier to federate the analyses and allow the raw data to remain in distributed silos. But federation is also a good way to discourage asking creative yet inessential questions that might later prove awkward or invite lawsuits, since litigation is an omnipresent worry in US healthcare. How companies like Calico/Google hope to navigate such minefields is a question they have yet to answer successfully.