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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

#221

Post by tptacek »

forgingahead wrote: post #220
tptacek wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I guess, tell that to every important artist, author, architect, craftsperson, and humanitarian. Paul Farmer and Norman Borlaug both had children, but it's hard to argue that their real purpose in life was to reproduce. Could you get more Paul Farmer time? Seems like a worthy goal.

In a nutshell, your comment illustrates well the issue facing many western nations. The uniqueness of an individual is somehow extended to being applicable to the average person, and then folks hand-wring about why things seem to be trending in a bad direction. Sure, Paul Farmer was special, but most people are not. To make any policy, or social conditioning, that is fine for an individual but bad for a collective, c…

I'm pro-natalist. I think raising children is intrinsically good. I have two kids of my own (both grown and in college now). I'm not a pro-natal absolutist. I do not think the exclusive purpose of life is to reproduce. That's the sentiment I responded to, and the one you're arguing in favor of.

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

#222

Post by nopenopenopeno »

sumy23 wrote: post #37
nopenopenopeno wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same logic can be applied to literally anything in a capitalist society. If the current way of doing things employs people, we can’t possibly do it any other way.

Yes, but 14% of jobs is a huge number. Healthcare is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, employment sectors.

Then replace 1% of it at a time. This is extremely basic stuff if you have any genuine interest in actually doing it.

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

#223

Post by helloworld11 »

So, 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....

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

#224

Post by 0xy »

the_d3f4ult wrote: post #109
0xy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a hard problem because the real problem is convincing a brain surgeon making $450,000 a year that he should be partially or wholly replaced with AI models. It's the same reason costs to build subway tunnels has dramatically increased in NYC, labor unions have the process by the throat and will accept not even a cent in reduced labor costs, even when improvements would improve safety or efficiency.

I am not aware of any AI model or technology that functions as anything beyond a toy in the healthcare space. There's very little utility to labelling things in healthcare - even in fields like ophthalmology, dermatology or radiology where companies have made some advances. Humans already do it very well and it's about 1% of the actual battle. Show me an AI that that can make a diagnosis, counsel a patient's family e…

Humans are terrible at giving healthcare. There are 8x more deaths in the US due to medical malpractice than from firearms. Clearly humans aren't very good at labeling if they get it wrong a huge portion of the time.

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

#225

Post by Rygian »

TuringNYC wrote: post #125
Rygian wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#226

Post by zxexz »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #89

What 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"""

Haven Healthcare - they failed. [0]

[0] https://hbr.org/2021/01/why-haven-healthcare-failed

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

#227

Post by dominotw »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #155
dominotw wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> total healthcare expenditure is somewhere around double that of most other first world countries with more universal healthcare systems, for worse outcomes in many objective measures I've seen this many times but it makes a meaningless healthcare = health correlation . America has lots of systemic problems that affect health outcomes that are outside of healthcare. Low quality fast food, food addiction, industriali…

> I've seen this many times but it makes a meaningless healthcare = health correlation . It doesn't, it's just making an observation. > America has lots of systemic problems that affect health outcomes that are outside of healthcare. Low quality fast food, food addiction, industrialized farming, corn subsides, food deserts, deceptive food marketing to name a few. Sure, America has many issues and many more than you'v…

> 2x healthcare expenditure for worse (or not significantly better) health than many other countries is a reasonable cost efficiency, to come up with some pretty strong evidence to support them.

yes we have healthcare system that treats disease, after that fact. Americans are a sickly group of people. Lionshare of expenditure goes to treating chronic metabolic illness. These people cannot be returned back health once they have metabolic syndromes. So matter how much money you spend on healthcare there is no real way to convert sickly ppl back into healthy people. No doctor has a way to fix diabetes or thyroid dysfunction.

Again, goes back to my original comment. "healthcare" has nothing to with "health".

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