HealthIT funding is up right now,  despite the downturn in global digital health investment, with data collection being such a big part of the reason why investors are all in on the HealthIT sector.  Do note that Big Tech et al is paying close attention to the space and making acquisitions.

Dr. Amazon Will See You Now, said the Wall Street Journal, noting that “Amazon and other companies are trying to disrupt the giant, inefficient U.S. healthcare sector. They’ve made little headway but a crop of upstarts is offering industry giants a chance to buy their way in.

“Amazon.com’s repeated failure to disrupt the industry underscores just how hard it is to make meaningful change.. As hard as healthcare has proven to crack, it is also too big of an opportunity to ignore. That explains why Amazon is trying again: It agreed in July to pay $3.9 billion for One Medical, a concierge-type primary-care service with nearly 200 medical offices in 25 markets… and will give Amazon the foothold in healthcare it struggled to build organically. In a not-too-distant future, your Prime membership may include a free annual checkup.”

As the Defender noted, “Not everyone sees the deal as a positive “opportunity” for healthcare consumers —  including some members of Congress and advocacy groups who cited antitrust considerations, others who raised privacy concerns and suggested the deal could undermine Medicare.”

But there’s more! “Amazon wants to provide direct and frequent services to consumers through primary care and leverage that relationship to sell even more services like drug deliveries through its online pharmacy business, which got its start with the acquisition of PillPack,” the Journal continued.

Smells more like building out the monopoly than it does teen spirit to us.

“What many target companies have in common is that they are involved, to varying degrees, in a newer approach to the provision of health known as value-based care. It differs from the more widespread fee-for-service model in which medical providers have an incentive to utilize the healthcare system as much as possible because that drives up compensation. Value-based care, by contrast, encourages providers to be more proactive in preventing illness because they also benefit from savings. It is too early to tell whether that approach will truly benefit patients or just improve the bottom line for providers and insurers.”

If we were to take a guess…

 

Microsoft is also focused on this space, as is Oracle, who is already Tracking 5 Billion People, and violating privacy laws globally. Meanwhile, Facebook reportedly received users’ sensitive health data from apps: “It’s incredibly dishonest,” CBS News reported. The company is also Receiving Sensitive Medical Information from Hospital Websites, via an ad tracking tool installed on many hospitals’ websites (that) has been collecting patients’ sensitive health information—including details about their medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments—and sending it to Facebook.

 

Next, Google announced last year that they’re still ‘all in’ on health, according to CNBC, noting that “Despite criticism over personal data privacy the tech giant is still betting on AI for the health industry, including partners like the Mayo Clinic, and consumer health innovation through its acquisition of Fitbit.

In fact, Google Chief Health Officer Karen DeSalvo said that the tech company wants to “weave health into everything we do.”” As if we didn’t know.

 

Apple’s very much in the mix as well,

…tracking data on the iPhone and “working to let customers bring medical information, including lab results and medical history, to their iPhones (via Apple Health Records),” said CNBC. Lest we forget, the Apple Watch is very much a health tracking device.

You know that Big Tech’s overarching plan is to not only control the health care system, or at least much of the data that’s fed into it, but we do wonder if they’d be happy stopping there, considering how prevalent censorship has become, especially in the Covid Era, when many medical practitioners and researchers were censored or deplatformed if they didn’t express views that were in lockstep with those of the tech cabal.

. Nothing to see here…

And is the technology that they’ve implemented so far on, say, our smartphones, really all that smart?  If what they’ve done to date is any indication, again, it’s all about data collection.

Consider our iPhone, which will collect health data, should we allow it to, and maybe even does in the background. We do look at the number of steps we take daily, for our personal research/tracking the tech itself. We do tend to take more steps in spring and summer, given the warmer temperatures, but fewer in winter, when the temperatures drop precipitously in our part of the world. The phone notes that we’d only taken, say, 5k steps that day, not taking into consideration the subzero temperature outside or that another snowmeggon is raging outside. No matter that there’s a weather app on that same phone, that monitors the weather on an hourly basis. Wouldn’t that factor in? Instead of ‘you’ve taken 5k fewer steps today than you did yesterday,’ how about ‘given the inclement weather and hazardous conditions, you wisely did not subject yourself to frostbite.’ Look, they’re tracking geolocation. They know if we’d been outside or not – and where we went, et al.

There’s no doubt that Big Tech wants to expand its footprint and monopolistic powers in the multi-trillion-dollar annual health care space, and again do note that the investment money is going to health IT rather than health care. This is nothing short of expanded surveillance by any other name. Attention must be paid, and this must be reigned in as soon as possible. Are the regulators paying attention at all or considering the bigger picture? Tech has long been hitting a bit too close to home. This time, they’re intruding where we live and breathe. Onward and forward.