If there’s a graveyard of failed health IT efforts, it’s littered with tombstones from big tech companies like IBM, Google, and Amazon.
Big tech companies are often hailed as saviours who can free the nation from the problems of our dysfunctional, inefficient and antiquated healthcare system. The reality is that initiatives by these organizations continue to fail, ultimately stifling true healthcare innovation and reducing market confidence in technologies that successfully meet real market needs.
After wasting time and money on half-baked solutions, organizations eventually gave up and wondered whether Big Tech’s motivation to save healthcare was based more on greed and hubris than actual innovation. Oracle to buy Cerner for $28 billion is the latest big tech investment to make headlines, and the deal is unlikely to close.
A Quick Look Back at Notable Big Tech Healthcare Failures
As a refresher, let’s review some of the more notable big tech healthcare disasters in recent years.
- IBM Watson: After billions of dollars in investment, IBM’s Watson AI data analytics solution fizzled after years of unprofitability. Watson did a great job answering the “Dangerous!” trivia question. But it has little impact on the healthcare industry. Watson’s life at IBM finally came to an end recently as it was partially sold, and every dollar IBM invested could be sold for just a few cents, marking the “amazing crash“Have high expectations for it.
- Google Health: Google’s personal health records service made a lot of headlines when it launched in 2008, but it had a short and useless life before ending go around the sewer Just three years later. Due to public apathy, low user adoption, and interoperability issues, Google Health was unable to provide many of the basic features that would have made it available.
- Haven Healthcare: Notable recent big tech healthcare failures are Haven Healthcare, a joint venture between Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase that aims to disrupt healthcare and health insurance. Despite being backed by some of the most powerful companies on the planet and hiring healthcare rock star Atul Gawande as CEO, the company disbanded after just three years as it was clearly far from its grand but ultimately self-righteousness. and condescending ideals. established.
Why does this keep happening?dirty healthcare data
It’s easy to understand the appeal of healthcare to Big Tech.it is $4.1 trillion market This is plagued by confusion and waste.As much as we in the industry sometimes like to tell ourselves, the reality is that American healthcare is horrible. Healthcare is more important expensive America is worse than anywhere else in the world, but in terms of quality, it’s worse than most developed countries life expectancy and results.
Why? The US healthcare system is based on billing codes—that is, financial information rather than clinical information. This leads to many problems due to the lack of granularity of claims data, which do not take into account many important factors, including the social determinants of patients’ health.
A consistent theme running through all of these missteps is that Big Tech continues to underestimate healthcare’s problem with “dirty data.” Healthcare is not engineering. In healthcare, data is rarely clean or consistent; it’s more like the Tower of Babel. Healthcare is full of industry-specific terms such as ICD-10, SNOMED, RxNorm, and MedDRA.
In fact, about 30% of the world’s data volume is generated by the healthcare industry, according to RBC Capital Markets. By 2025, the compound annual growth rate of healthcare data is expected to reach 36%, faster than manufacturing, financial services, media and entertainment industries.
Patient data may be contained in medical histories, diagnoses, observations, laboratory reports, and imaging reports, just to name a few of the many different sources. Additionally, each patient record is unique, and medical data can be complex and confusing.
In addition to its complexity, clinical data is often convoluted and frustratingly redundant and incomplete at the same time. It’s stored in individual providers’ separate electronic health record systems, but it’s riddled with misspellings and inconsistencies.
Much of the valuable data healthcare organizations need to improve decision-making is also unstructured. This information is trapped in the “notes” section of the EHR or in PDF and image files, making it difficult for machine learning algorithms to decipher.Estimate approximately 80% of healthcare data is unstructured.
A lack of expertise in healthcare by big tech companies could create conditions that stifle innovation and reduce market confidence in certain types of technologies. When organizations spend time and money implementing large technology solutions that ultimately fail to address their pain points, many simply abandon the technology—even when other innovative solutions are available on the market.
For healthcare, by someone with healthcare expertise
Look, I Google and use Big Tech’s tools like everyone else. For the most part, they’re good at what they do — and when they stick with what they do — it’s not healthcare.
As we’ve seen time and time again, big tech companies don’t get access to the right healthcare because they can’t overcome industry-specific dirty data issues, and because they’re too proud to integrate third-party solutions. Everyone (that is: the healthcare industry, the big tech companies themselves, oh yes, patients) frankly would be better off if they stopped trying.
Rather than relying on big tech companies to solve big problems in healthcare, stakeholders can better understand solutions developed for healthcare by seasoned experts who understand and understand the industry.
Photo: pictafolio, Getty Images
