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Big Tech Is Going After Health Care

nytimes.com

61–70 of 206 posts

Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean where I said > I didn't spill any data (that I know of) > doctors also don't even know how to frame their problems, > most of them punch out of math as fast as possible.

How about the part where you said: > How many lives did you save today? Zero? Ok, STFU Last time I was at the hospital they seriously asked if I wanted Reiki. If you can get through med school and still believe in that, sorry If I don't have much respect for your education. Doctors and IT people are the two most arrogant professions I've ever come across, and I even work in finance.

Thank you, point partially taken. I deleted the expletives. Have an upvote.

Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care

#62
post #7

Good. I spent a few years working in a medical IoT startup, and the current state of the "mainstream" medical monitoring technology is not inspiring. During a brainstorming meeting, I asked one of our cofounders, a physician, to tell me about some of the problems he had seen in health. Don't try and solve it, just lets talk about problems. He said that by far one of the most common causes for re-hospitalization is co…

The tech is the easy part. Integrating into a 24/7 high turn-over environment where all employees, IT included, are stretched to the max, is the real issue.

Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care

#63

As someone who most recently worked in product at a healthcare startup I found the most difficult thing about innovation in the space is the cost of compliance/regulation. When you work in an industry that is so highly regulated, and assuming you are working at a company that follows the rule of law, how do you actually "disrupt" a set of problems in this industry when there is so little wiggle room for doing things…

> One of the biggest WTF moments I had when I first started was realizing that fax communication is HIPAA-compliant whereas email/SMS are not

That's not exactly the case; fax communication can easily violate HIPAA and email, appropriately secured, can be compliant, even for PHI (SMS is more problematic because it's unsecurable).

The issue is specifically that there is precedent (or, at least, a widely held interpretation, not sure there is actually directly applicable case law) that fax is not an electronic communication mechanism for the purposes of HIPAA law and regulation, so while general rules on disclosure and communication apply to it.

> even though in theory anyone could walk by a fax machine at any time and take medically sensitive information sent over.

Not having appropriate safeguards to prevent that at a HIPAA covered entity is, itself, a violation of HIPAA.

Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care

#64
I am a big believer that we have already discovered a safe, free, plentiful lever against some of the most high profile diseases (cancer, Alzheimer’s, some mental illnesses) out there in fasting/calorie restriction/keto.

I highly doubt it will ever become mainstream for the simple reason that no healthcare or big tech co can make money from telling people to eat in a way that induces ketosis.

Science of Fasting doc: https://www.amazon.com/Science-Fasting-Sylvie-Gilman/dp/B075...

Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care

#65

As someone who most recently worked in product at a healthcare startup I found the most difficult thing about innovation in the space is the cost of compliance/regulation. When you work in an industry that is so highly regulated, and assuming you are working at a company that follows the rule of law, how do you actually "disrupt" a set of problems in this industry when there is so little wiggle room for doing things…

so ELI5 why we shouldn't just get rid of HIPAA? from the way people talk, all HIPAA does is guarantee that things will always be awful(?) how does HIPAA help if it just keeps us in the past?

It’s also the law that prevents doctors from telling their friends about your hilarious medical conditions, or selling information about you to pharmaceutical companies to market to you directly.

It’s a very thorny law, but it’s like that for a reason.

Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care

#66
post #3

And it's going to throw your medical privacy out of the window in the process. I suppose we'll also see some major deregulation similar to the net neutrality repeal in the healthcare industry before long.

Not necessarily. You can still provide decent services collecting anonymized data.

Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I was responding to: > Do you think all weight spikes simply equate to having CHF? You can't just rely on such a basic measurement when dealing with an incredibly complex system such as the human body. Considering you were knowingly addressing someone who worked in the space and blew right past something you obviously knew within seconds (not all weight spikes equate to CHF), thinking there was even a re…

You would think OP would know that, but the original comment basically tells us all to measure our weight simply to check for CHF. If it were that simple we'd all do it I presume, but of course weight change can be a range of things. Many of which are not problematic. Hence why I pointed out that better measurement devices are needed. I've also got a feeling that it may just be you in particular that 'IT' don't like…

You're still missing killjoywashere's point.

Their point was that _of course_ everyone involved (including the person you were originally replying to) knows that a weight-measurement is not sufficient to diagnose CHF. Literally everyone in the conversation has already presupposed that point.

However, blhack working with a physician learned that it would be a super useful medical tool to have an automated mechanism for taking those weight measurements because it's a useful early indicator.

Your response was exceptionally dismissive, given that there were people in that space who knew what they were doing and knew it was useful. Yet, you came by and in 10 seconds decided it wasn't useful and wasn't worth doing.

So, what makes you more qualified to make that decision that blhack and the physician they were working with? Why are you so arrogant to assume that the physician who stated that would be useful was just wrong?

Your insight wasn't particularly insightful, and you presented it in a way that was condescending and dismissive of others in the space.

Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care

#68

As someone who most recently worked in product at a healthcare startup I found the most difficult thing about innovation in the space is the cost of compliance/regulation. When you work in an industry that is so highly regulated, and assuming you are working at a company that follows the rule of law, how do you actually "disrupt" a set of problems in this industry when there is so little wiggle room for doing things…

I work in medical devices. The regulation can be unnecessarily prohibitive, but more often than not I see it used as a cop-out.

Where one entrepreneur says "the status quo in this space is so behind the times I can't work there," another says "there are enhancements waiting to be back-ported into this tightly controlled space from domains that have already been proven it to be a good idea." Only one of those people knows how to make money.

That's just the low-hanging fruit. And there's so much of it. Foot-stomping about having a formal quality system instead of "move fast and break things" is letting the perfect be the enemy of good.

Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure email can be HIPAA compliant as long as you implement the system using the established guidelines.

Indeed it is as long as you’ve configured your email system to use TLS and not downgrade to no encryption if the handshake fails for mail systems where HIPAA-governed information is departing to. Source: Not a lawyer, not your lawyer. Sign off provided by non profit bio research orgs lawyer before I set it up.

That’s more for B2B use cases. Like between a medical practice and hospital.

The unreliability of delivery to destinations that don’t support TLS will create customer service issues in B2C scenarios.

Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care

#70
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you on that. For reference I pulled up Google's announcement that "Google Health" is being shutdown. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/update-on-google-hea... I could see Big Tech enter in other areas (Apple Watch and and their research app are promising)

The post doesn't say that they shut it down due to compliance costs. It says they shut it down because almost nobody found it useful.

I think the argument is that the problems are too challenging for the management culture common at places like Google. Getting a product developed, certified, and deployed is likely be longer than it takes for them to get bored, forget what they were doing, and move on to something else.
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