Information technology is rapidly sweeping the industry, and the healthcare industry is certainly no exception. The world's top five technology companies, FAAMG, are competing in the smart healthcare industry, joining the race for healthcare and medical care that will generate huge economic benefits in the future.
Digitalization and AI in healthcareThe healthcare industry has always been a very specialized and deep vertical technology industry, where traditional industries have little to no access. However, global technology companies have long recognized that the time has come for artificial intelligence to be applied to the healthcare industry; at the end of 2019, Harvard Business Review (HBR) predicted that in the next ten years, artificial intelligence will add more than ten trillion dollars of value to the global economy, with the most important industry being healthcare and medicine, which is equivalent to ten times the amount of the world's top 100 companies by market capitalization, the U.S. Microsoft, which will be ranked number one in the world by market capitalization in 2019. The most important of these industries is healthcare and healthcare.
In the past, the world's top ten companies by market capitalization have been dominated by the technology industry, where Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google (Google's parent company, Alphabet), known as the FAAMG, have been quietly launching their AI medical technology programs; These five technology companies are not only competing to invest in the smart healthcare industry, but also to drive a new smart healthcare, leading to a new industry chain that will join the global healthcare and medical race.
The top five global technology companies will lead consumers into the future of smart healthcareApple
Apple was the first technology company to enter the healthcare space with software and hardware, starting with the acquisition of Gliimpse, the largest healthcare personal data platform.
Apple? is the first company to take the plunge into the healthcare space with hardware and software, starting with the acquisition of Gliimpse, the largest platform for healthcare data. Early successes included research on Parkinson's, autism, and later analyzing the correlation between sleep habits and conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity, COPD, and depression. We also announced a partnership with Health Gorilla to obtain clinical-grade healthcare and diagnostic data, as well as joining forces with Dex, a glucose monitoring vendor, to expand the range of iPhone smartphone services that are already available to the general public, with a focus on smartphones, of course.
The medical community has long recognized that electronic medical records lack the ****ability to communicate with each other and the structure of the data itself, and have been criticized for their utility; for example, as everyone knows, when you travel around the world, or even in Southeast Asia or other developing countries, you can pull out your credit card and spend money right away, but your past electronic medical records are still not available in places like the United States. However, your past electronic medical records are still not readable in advanced countries like the United States when you visit a doctor in an emergency. But Apple took the initiative two years ago to join the Argonaut Project, an open standards initiative launched by the medical community under the HL7 health information exchange standards agreement; this move has really made the industry realize that the success or failure of smart healthcare depends on how it connects medical information in different structural formats, and that's where the last mile lies. The company even claimed to have obtained several key U.S. patents in 2017, and the ambition to enter the medical industry by integrating app software with smartphones and watches is obvious.
The young Facebook founder Zukerberg set up a foundation under the couple's last name as early as 2015, with plans to invest $3 billion over the next 10 years to fund scientists around the world to study treatments for diseases. The first project invested $600 million to establish the Biohub research center, the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco, Stanford University, elite scientists and engineers together, *** with the research and development of tools for the prevention, treatment and management of disease, and vigorously sponsor the "human cell atlas" program; so that scientists and people can more quickly understand their own body cells to achieve further prevention and treatment of disease effect!
While there are already millions of Facebook users actively sharing and discussing specific patient symptoms in social media groups every day, the company has conservatively declared that it has no plans to add value to these discussions as a marketable product, given the misuse of personal data a few years ago. But Instagram, a social media platform similar to Facebook, was also compared to Facebook by a Harvard research team, which demonstrated that AI algorithms could be used to predict users with a tendency to depression through the photos and messages shared by the community, and Facebook has since expressed interest in applying similar technology to early screening and detection of psychiatric disorders.
Amazon
Amazon's approach to the healthcare industry is very different from that of other tech companies, with a 25-year track record of consumer online purchases, including products that individuals need to improve their health or clinical needs, a personalized user experience, and transparent pricing. With a personalized user experience design and transparent pricing options, the company aims to sell healthcare products that are tailored to the needs of its members. In addition, AWS, which provides its own cloud services, has been competing with Microsoft and Google for orders for cloud computing services that the healthcare industry and pharmaceutical companies desperately need. Two years ago, Amazon set up a lab focusing on online medical technology, and named it "1492" from the year Columbus discovered the New World; the team is currently looking for ways to obtain structured information from the existing electronic medical record system that has been de-identified and further added value in other databases; if it succeeds, Amazon will be able to make this medical knowledge more easily available to consumers and specialists. specialists.
Meanwhile, Amazon is working with J.P. Man and Berkshire Hathaway. In the first quarter of 2019, Amazon, along with J.P. Man and Berkshire Hathaway, finally*** formed a joint venture to create Haven, a new nonprofit company focused on healthcare products, which claims to have the same great shopping experience that Amazon offers consumers, with the goal of providing transparent pricing and high-quality healthcare products, including a wide range of prescription medicines and affordable treatments. The new company claims to have the same great shopping experience as Amazon.
Microsoft Microsoft
Microsoft's early planning for smart healthcare was to integrate biologists, computer scientists, and engineers at the Cambridge Research Laboratory in the United Kingdom to test the water temperature by using computer computation to solve the problem of cancer; and later, in the Hanover program, to use AI software to read medical papers published every year. Later, in the Hanover program, artificial intelligence software was used to read medical papers published every year to help doctors predict which drugs would be most effective in treating cancer patients, in the hope of achieving the goal of helping to cure cancer, and both of them have slightly achieved results. The lab is also working on research related to medical information systems, the immune system, medical imaging, and mental health care.
Later, Microsoft Research (MSR) focused on using artificial intelligence to improve the quality of healthcare, and launched the Healthcare NExT program to find new ways to treat deadly diseases like cancer. The Microsoft Genomics service helps medical researchers to invent drugs for the precise treatment of cancer and other diseases through the processing of genetic data. For example, by analyzing a patient's health and tumor cell tissues and referring to the medical data of other patients, physicians can choose the most effective treatment options. 2018 Microsoft and a hospital in India collaborated to design new machine learning algorithms for predicting the risk of heart disease and assisted local doctors in quickly finding relevant treatments, which was quite effective.
Flatiron, a Google-backed startup, has been helping oncologists with electronic medical records for years. It was quickly acquired by Roche, of course, for its ability to automatically analyze FDA-referenced real-world data (RWD) in a fully informational way, along with the results of clinical-grade drug tests that had already been compiled. Verily, another company, is a start-up that was separated from Google's X Lab, the laboratory that performed the most special tasks in those years. It is committed to developing special tools and software to collect and integrate all kinds of health information, and claims to be able to prevent and manage diseases, and it has cooperated with international pharmaceutical companies such as Josén, GlaxoSmithKline, and Sanofi in the past to set up a company that researches and develops therapeutic treatments to treat diabetes, as well as to develop software and hardware devices to treat diabetes. In the past, the company had cooperated with international pharmaceutical companies such as Josun, GlaxoSmithKline, and Sanofi to establish a disease therapy R&D company to develop software and hardware devices for diabetes diagnosis and treatment. Recently, the company has applied ECG-related technology to actual clinical use, recording heart activity information in smartwatch devices, allowing more disease research data to be recorded through watches anytime, anywhere. But in a 2019 patent, Verily demonstrated that machine learning algorithms can help pathologists successfully identify cancer cells in medical images, giving the company a leg up in a key area of digital pathology development.
At the same time, Google's Labs launched an ambitious new initiative to create a new company, Cityblock Health, which will focus on low-income populations in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, helping to treat low-income patients who qualify for Medicaid, which is expected to provide low-income citizens with cheaper and better personalized health care. Of course, Google has also conducted a lot of pioneering research in the field of computer-assisted medical imaging over the past few years, such as using CT images to predict lung cancer, using retinal images as training materials, and automatically assessing the risk of cardiovascular disease, all of which have greatly excited the medical industry.
In September 2019, Google signed a ten-year contract with Mayo Clinic, a leading medical institution in the United States, which demonstrates Google's commitment to becoming an online service provider for the healthcare industry.
These world-class tech companies seem to have been eager to get into the healthcare space for a long time now, with the goal of extending their reach to the most relevant personal health and medical needs, based on their vast customer data, and with actual products or services.
* Content licensed from From AI to Smart Healthcare by Jiang Rongxian, published by Business Week.