Predictions for 2020: Big tech's here to stay, digital health moves through Gartner hype cycle and more |

Our second edition on Digital Health Prospects for 2020

How HIPAA, investor funding, digital health commercialization, and other focus areas will be changing over the course of the new year.

Big tech isn’t going away — and its healthcare moves will only get bolder

This has become a perennial prediction, but it’s still an important one. Few people believe at this point that Amazon’s Amazon Care program will stay an employee experiment for long. We’re convinced it’s headed for a wider rollout that will see Amazon offering, or at least facilitating, telemedicine services, disrupting the supply chain for care the same way it has with so many other things. Exactly what form that will take remains to be seen, but healthcare is a market ripe for disruption and Amazon is well-positioned to get more involved in disrupting it, as indeed they already have with mail-order prescription delivery. We’ve heard surprisingly little out of Haven, Amazon’s joint venture with JP Morgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway, but we suspect Haven and Amazon Care are pieces of the same puzzle. Some idea how Amazon intends to grow and dominate the market is the fact they have purchased the domain  (.care).  A visit to the Amazon Care Program Website reveals the comprehensive plan which is enabled by digital health apps.

Apple and Google may not be taking as direct a role, but we expect to see them slowly expanding their role as well. Apple continues to invest in a whole ecosystem of hardware and software around both health monitoring and mobile-enabled health research. Recent signals by Google that it may want to compete — including a new 510(k) clearance for the Verily Study Watch and the company’s acquisition of Fitbit — should only heat up Apple’s efforts.

As for Google, we had the opportunity to hear Google Health VP David Feinberg speak last week at the Startup Health Festival. After sharing several interesting AI projects the company is involved in around mammography and eye health, this is how he described the company’s vision:

“Fundamentally in 10 years, I feel like we'll be successful if we have helped the health care system in communities redesign health care. So it's actually centered around patients and families. I think we fundamentally have built the wrong system. And I think these tools can help us achieve that. How that looks, I'm not sure. But it will be more affordable. It will be much easier. The quality will be better. There'll be joy in being a caregiver. And health will be something that you don't have to worry about, because when bad stuff happens or if we can predict bad stuff, we can get you in the right direction.

Data privacy will remain in the spotlight, and HIPAA won’t cut it

The limits of HIPAA are a double-edged sword for big tech, something Google learned the hard way this year when news broke of its Ascensia partnership in a less-than-flattering way. The company was operating within the letter of the decades-old law, but that was cold comfort to patients alarmed that (A) Google had access to their data and (B) they weren’t notified.

At events like the HIMSS Security Forum in December, a growing chorus of voices saying that we need a new law — some kind of fusion of HIPAA and GDPR that protects patient data even if it didn’t originate in the health system (for instance, if it came from a direct-to-consumer wearable).

These concerns aren’t new, but that chorus is getting louder. We need something that gives patients more transparency into the hundreds of business associates agreements that permit hospital partners to use that data in increasingly novel and varied ways. We need a law that acknowledges the limits of de-identification.

For new entities entering the health care market, it will do well to have their legal counsel study the HIPAA rules regarding business associate agreements.  The health IT culture is very different from ordinary offerings in the way of apps

“Everyone’s concerned about what’s happening to their data,” Salesforce CMO Ash Zenooz told MobiHealthNews in an interview on the sidelines of JP Morgan. “And this is a global thing. GDPR tried to address that. But our healthcare data for our interactions with our providers and insurance companies lives in a place, but there’s a ton of other data about us that’s living outside that’s not protected by HIPAA. … Most of our data is sitting outside and that’s the data that a good part of that is going to predict what’s happening to a person’s health, and I think people are appropriately concerned about where that’s being utilized.”







MobiHealthNews' predictions for 2020: Big tech's here to stay, digital health moves through Gartner hype cycle and more | MobiHealthNews: