Big tech goes after your health care
When Daniel Poston, a second-year medical student in New York, opened the App Store on his iPhone a couple of weeks ago, he was astonished to see an app for a new heart study prominently featured.
Patients often learn about new research studies through in-person conversations with their doctors. But not only did this study, run by Stanford University, use a smartphone to recruit consumers, it was financed by Apple. And it involved using an app on the Apple Watch to try to identify irregular heart rhythms.
Intrigued, Poston, who already owned an Apple Watch, registered for the heart study right away. Then he took to Twitter to encourage others to do likewise — suggesting that it was part of a breakthrough in health care.
Revolutionized?
“It’s not inconceivable, by the time I graduate from medical school,” Poston said, “that the entire practice of medicine can be revolutionized by technology.”
Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants have transformed the way billions of us communicate, shop, socialize and work. Now, as consumers, medical centers and insurers increasingly embrace health-tracking apps, tech companies want a bigger share of the more than $3 trillion spent annually on health care in the United States, too. The Apple Heart Study reflects that intensified effort.
The companies are accelerating their efforts to remake health care by developing or collaborating on new tools for consumers, patients, doctors, insurers and medical researchers. And they are increasingly investing in health startups.
In the first 11 months of this year, 10 of the largest tech companies in the United States were involved in health care equity deals worth $2.7 billion, up from just $277 million for all of 2012, according to data from CB Insights, a research firm that tracks venture capital and startups.
Their own approach
Each tech company is taking its own approach, betting that its core business strengths could ultimately improve people’s health — or at least make health care more efficient. Apple, for example, has focused on its consumer products, Microsoft on online storage and analytics services, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, on data.
“The big-picture reason that a lot of these tech companies are getting into health care now is because the market is too big, too important and much too personal to their users for them to ignore,” said John Prendergass, associate director of health care investment at Ben Franklin Technology Partners, a nonprofit organization in Philadelphia.
Physicians and researchers caution that it is too soon to tell whether novel continuous-monitoring tools, like apps for watches and smartphones, will help reduce disease and prolong lives — or just send more people to doctors for unnecessary tests.
Lots of hype
“There’s no shortage of hype,” said Dr. Eric Topol, a digital medicine expert who directs the Scripps Translational Science Institute in San Diego. “We’re in the early stages of learning these tools: Who do they help? Who do they not help? Who do they provide just angst, anxiety, false positives?”
The tech industry is certainly no stranger to health. IBM, Intel and Microsoft have long provided enterprise services to the health care industry.
But now they, and other companies, are more visibly focused on creating, or investing in, new kinds of technologies for doctors, patients and consumers.
This year, Amazon was one of the investors in a financing round for Grail, a cancer-detection startup, which raised more than $900 million. Apple acquired Beddit, a maker of sleep-tracking technology, for an undisclosed amount.
And Alphabet, perhaps the most active American consumer tech giant in health and biotech, acquired Senosis Health, a developer of apps that use smartphone sensors to monitor certain health signals, also for an undisclosed amount.
A dedicated unit
Alphabet also has a research unit, Verily Life Sciences, dedicated to developing new tools to collect and analyze health data.
This year, Verily introduced a health research device, the Verily Study Watch, with sensors that can collect data on heart rate, gait and skin temperature. Now, the watch is to be used in a research study, Project Baseline and financed by Verily, to follow about 10,000 volunteers.
Microsoft, already a major supplier of software and cloud services to medical centers, is also ramping up its health business.