Have you ever felt like you couldn’t live without your favourite piece of technology? Well, you’re not alone. A woman in Cincinnati (literally) couldn’t live without her Apple Watch after it woke her up and notified her of a blood clot. If her watch hadn’t woken her up, doctors think she wouldn’t have woken up from her nap.
Stories like that are just the tip of the iceberg. Over the past decade, Big Tech is making big investments in healthcare. Not all of them have been successful (Amazon’s partnership with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway to build a health insurer comes to mind) and many of them are still in development (Apple’s until recently secret 12-year-old project to build a noninvasive blood glucose monitor). But the trend is clear, Big Tech wants to disrupt healthcare.
These companies like to position this interest as altruistic. For example, Apple CEO Tim Cook believes Apple’s health projects could be the companies “greatest contribution to mankind”. But there is also a clear business interest, the U.S. healthcare industry is estimated to be worth ~$800 billion.
Research from RBC Capital Markets suggest that 30% of the world’s total data volume is generated by the healthcare industry. And Big Tech want to capture this data and help the world make sense of it. It has driven their decade-long push into wearable devices (Google buying FitBit and Apple launching the Apple Watch) and has recently driven the industry to agree on data interoperability standards to bring health systems together and allow patients and practitioners to better utilise all of this data being collected.
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