Big Tech Is Going After Health Care
nytimes.com
Big Tech Is Going After Health Care
1–10 of 206 posts
Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care
#2Would love to get some insight into the work at Verily or DeepMind Health for a software developer interested in working in healthcare.
Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care
#3And 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.
Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care
#4They are going after health care because they either ran out of customers or people to advertise to.
Hopefully they can make some progress but so far I don't see much.
Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care
#5This article is pretty devoid of content, and really only mentions that the Apple watch can be used as a constant heart monitor. Big deal, you aren't going to get much information from measuring just your heart beat and knowing next to nothing else of whats going on in the rest of your body too.
The real technological breakthrough will come when we have the ability to measure in real time what is going on in our various organs, such as enzyme production and transportation of molecules, but that's a long way out yet.
Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care
#6And 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.
Maybe, but in this case there's an entrenched interest (health care companies) that might want to use medical privacy as a way to keep themselves from being Uber-ized.
Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care
#7Good.
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 congestive heart failure. It's a super common problem, and it's actually really easy to catch (it has strong indicators). When your heart begins to fail, depending on what side of it fails, your body will retain fluid (in the form of blood) in either your heart or your organs. Regardless, you will bloat up, and gain weight quickly.
So if a patient is at risk for CHF, a nurse will monitor their weight every day (or multiple times a day) and watch for spikes. If their weight spikes, a doctor will intervene in whatever way is necessary.
Can you imagine my frustration at hearing this? It's this massive problem with an obvious (CHEAP!! SO FUCKING CHEAP!!) solution.
I spend $30 on a scale from amazon immediately, and about an hour after it arrived I had it connected to an android tablet and broadcasting its readings to a webservice.
We never went to market with that (long story). Please, if you have the means to take something like that and scale it, do so. You could save lives. I'm currently trying. More people should be trying. This stuff is so easy, and the impact that you could have is massive.
Also: please call your grandparents and just talk to them. Ask them how they are feeling. Social isolation (full disclosure: this is what my current project is trying to solve) is probably the area where we as software people could have the biggest impact.
Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care
#8Yeah, nothing's going to happen. Compliance costs are too high for any of Silicon Valley's business models to work.
Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care
#9If there is one industry that needs to be disrupted, that is US's health care industry, it is too expensive.
Re: Big Tech Is Going After Health Care
#10As 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 differently? Following legal guidelines in healthcare means reenforcing bad norms rather than disrupting them.
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, even though in theory anyone could walk by a fax machine at any time and take medically sensitive information sent over.