Please support Telehealth.org’s ability to deliver helpful news, opinions, and analyses by turning off your ad blocker. Partnerships between Amazon Care, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are making steady inroads into the healthcare system. They continue to make significant disclosures about their plans to transform the healthcare system. Telehealth.org offers this information to give readers, including clinicians, administrators, directors, supervisors, and start-up executives an opportunity to watch how healthcare is being transformed by technology. With that information, the telehealth community will be in a better position to make decisions about future purchases, employment, contracting, partnership, and beyond.
Amazon’s Debut Digital Healthcare Accelerator
Houston Methodist and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are working together to introduce voice assistants to hospitals. AWS and KidsX, a digital health accelerator owned by Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, have opted for ten companies to enter the first AWS Healthcare Accelerator.
The goal is to connect early-stage digital health solutions with AWS’ healthcare provider organizations to accelerate care and facilitate potential pilots and partnerships between providers and enterprises.
Apple Watches are Used to Measure Heart Rate
Mount Sinai researchers provided Apple Watches to 361 healthcare workers from seven New York City hospitals to monitor their heart rates for a study on stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Apple Unveiled Health Record-Sharing
Apple’s most recent software update, iOS 15, was released on September 20 and allowed users to share their health app data with their healthcare providers. Cerner, Allscripts, Meditech, and DrChrono are among the six electronic health record (EHR) companies involved in the launch.
Apple Partnership with UnitedHealthcare
Apple telehealth and UnitedHealthcare have formed a partnership to provide approximately 3 million commercial members with unrestricted access to Apple Fitness+, a fitness service centered on the Apple Watch. It is the first time Apple Fitness+ has collaborated with a health plan. See Telehealth.org’s latest article, Depression, MCI & Autism Biomarker Behavioural Tools by Apple with Biogen, WHO, UCLA, Harvard, & Duke, about Amazon’s recent achievements in digital healthcare.
Google Health Efforts in Digital Healthcare
Apple’s well-known competitor, Google, is also making great strides toward developing new health features and collaborating with popular digital healthcare companies to expand its services. In a service known as Google Health, the tech giant is bringing together “products and services that connect and bring meaning to health information.”
Google Collaboration with CommonSpirit
CommonSpirit Health will use Chicago-based Google’s Workspace platform to strengthen patient and employee collaboration across its 140 hospitals. In 21 states, CommonSpirit is now available on Google Workspace at over 1,000 care sites.
Google Collaboration with Mayo Clinic
Google and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, partnered on an artificial intelligence algorithm to improve brain stimulation and aid in treating patients with psychotic disorders and direct head injuries. The “basis profile curve identification” algorithm aims to aid researchers in determining how brain regions interact with one another. Patients with epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other conditions may benefit from the algorithm.
Google Collaboration with ProMedica
The Toledo, Ohio-based company ProMedica announced that it would integrate a new digital musculoskeletal rehabilitation channel developed with IncludeHealth and Google into its care offerings, allowing musculoskeletal patients to receive physical therapy virtually and in person.
Google Collaboration with Cue Health
Google is working on an innovative respiratory biothreat detection system with Cue Health, Google’s COVID-19 test provider. With Google Cloud, the team intends to develop a respiratory biothreat detection system that incorporates it all, from at-home diagnostic tests to real-time viral sampling, as well as analytical and predictive competence.
Microsoft Gains Access to 17 Healthcare Systems with its Truveta Acquisition
Microsoft has established significant collaborations with healthcare partners such as Mayo Clinic, Epic, Cerner, and Change Healthcare.
Microsoft Partnership with Truveta
The new partnership with Truveta would provide it with access to yet more healthcare systems across the United States by leveraging Truveta’s network of health system partners. Truveta is backed by 17 US health systems, including Northwell Health, CommonSpirit Health, Providence Health, and Trinity Health. Its technology sifts through the deidentified patient data from all its users using AI and machine learning. Truveta’s partnership with Microsoft comes after a recent $95 million Series A funding round, The Microsoft partnership will allow Truveta to leverage Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to maintain cybersecurity in the face of evolving regulatory changes. Meanwhile, Microsoft is likely to tap Truveta’s network of health system partners to increase its strategic foothold in healthcare.
There is no doubt that the healthcare of the 2020s is much different than it was 10 or 20 years ago. As one peers into the future, these technology giants are important to watch, as their marketplace shifts will only create larger and larger shifts in the everyday practice of healthcare, creating seismic change for all stakeholders. Apple telehealth proliferation through numerous strategic alliances is a company to watch, along with Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
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These tech tyrants need to be dissolved. Don’t be fooled by them. They have brought the unhealth to the world. Now they want to help us get healthier?
I completely agree with the previous comment. This is not going to be good for general public health. These companies already have giant profits and have proven they do not act for the public good. All they ever really want is more money. All of this takes us AWAY from Medicare for All and keeps us locked into our profit-driven, dysfunctional health care system.
This is bad, very bad. Their helpful behaviors are tools are to help them to develop AI that will replace our counseling profession.