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Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

economist.com

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Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#171

Post by dekhn »

randcraw wrote: post #129
cardosof wrote: post #72

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

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…

Why do you think Calico is a failure? I think the jury is still out on that one.

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#172

Post by nightski »

sidcool wrote: post #156
nightski wrote: post #133

I 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.

"dumb advertising company" is trivialising the amazing tech and products Google has. Google has very justified bad reputation around product shutdowns and privacy, but I don't think being dumb is one of them.

I was not calling Google or its engineers dumb, that was not my intent. I am saying their success is attributed to dumb things, aka advertising. Google has a way of sucking in really smart people to work on potentially great things that end up solely existing to feed the dumb advertising machine and heavily exploiting their users in the process. It's really quite evil.

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#173

Post by jcranberry »

jholman wrote: post #67
tchvil wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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! ;)

Because 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.

Contextually the person is obviously trying to use the french borrow word voilà.

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#174

Post by dekhn »

paulmd wrote: post #57

As 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,…

it's much easier to get hospitals to share EHR data than you think. Both from the anecdote level (when switching health care provider companies, my doctor was able to export my EHR from Kaiser and import it to Sutter with a single click. Two completely different systems (which happen to both be running the same underlying software).

At the generalization level, many companies make deals with health providers to get various forms of access to EHRs.

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#175

Post by Gehlitio »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #141
Gehlitio wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we talking about the same company? Google maps was and still is free, available and changed lives. GCP is extremely innovative. From full end to end encryption including encryption on rest. Google workspace works like a charm. They have well working ML in all newer pixel phones for images etc. They have tons of bleeding edge research papers on so many different ml topics (are you aware of their research blog?) Go…

> Are we talking about the same company? Yes.

No post body was provided.

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#176

Post by mthmohan »

ciphol wrote: post #145
Gehlitio wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you life with something chronic? Something were not a lot of people are doing research and we're there was no real discovery in the last 20 years? Because I do and you know how scattered the field of medicine is? There is one realistic way of getting more people with chronic issues new threatments and it's data. Lots and lots of it. IF someone can pull that of while protecting the individuals I believe it's alphab…

That's the possible upside. The possible downside is "if you ever search for a disease in Chrome, or on your Android device, or at google.com, we will notify your insurance company who will raise your rates".

So if one of my friends has Crohn's and I search for it to understand what I should be aware of, my rates would go up? HIPAA specifically prohibits the sharing of medical information unless needed for care. If there is any one here that we should be annoyed at it's the insurance companies. Hospitals are losing money and the insurance companies are posting record profits.

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#177

Post by Gehlitio »

cupofpython wrote: post #130
Gehlitio wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checkout their last Google Io. They know how they make their money and don't hide it. But they make you as an individual disappear. It's a much better compromise than from any other company and they drive this topic for years.

you dont disappear. you become embedded. they are metaphorically assigning you a number and stripping you of an identity. It is dehumanizing. At the end of the day, it's just you by a different name. Instead of owning it and claiming "we have this information on Gehlitio" they say things like "We have these generalizations about anybody who happens to use HN, speaks in English, bought X Y and Z, subscribes to A, "

It sounds to me that you put a negative empathis on 'dehumanizing' but you only talk about an ad id.

I disagree on this sentiment, I don't care if there is an dehumanizing number for me in a ad context. I would prefer it over a personal id.

Anyway I still care much more for having a cure for my chronic pain.

Good for you if you don't need this.

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#178

Post by speedylight »

nightski wrote: post #133

I 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.

Google may make shitty business decisions for their customers, but their technical innovations is nothing to laugh at. I mean AlphaFold alone killed off entire careers in the protein folding space just because of how good it was at predicting those structures.

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#179

Post by h2odragon »

abrichr wrote: post #163
skywal_l wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 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.

How so in terms of software quality?

Form 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.

Re: Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

#180

Post by edmundsauto »

ciphol wrote: post #158
edmundsauto wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So higher insurance rates versus getting better research into life saving treatments? When you put it that way…

Higher insurance rates seem likely, and significantly better research seems unlikely.

Ah, I disagree. Google is a very good steward of personal data, IMO. And I’m pretty sure health care would be markedly improved if all the data were centralized.

So I guess it boils down to a difference of opinion is all.

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