In some ways, it is the best of times for big tech companies. Tech companies are the five biggest companies in the world by market cap. Jeff Bezos is now the richest man in the world. Even people in third world countries increasingly have access to smartphones, not to mention Facebook, online shopping, and Alexa.
In other ways, it is the worst of times for them. We worry about our personal data; we lament the decline of retail shopping; we realize that many of us may suffer from "smartphone addiction."
But few of us are anxious to go back to a 1990's era of technology.
Amanda Lotz, a professor at University of Michigan, recently pointed out that the Big Five tech companies -- Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft -- emerged from and still dominate largely distinct businesses. At the risk of oversimplifying:
- Alphabet seeks to make information easier to find and understood; Google dominates online searches.
- Amazon seeks to make it easy to find and purchase products; it dominates online shopping.
- Apple seeks to make beautiful, easy-to-use computing hardware, with proprietary software running it; it dominates the smartphone market (especially in terms of profits).
- Facebook seeks "to bring the world closer" through social networks; it dominates social media.
- Microsoft seeks to be our operating system (OS); it still dominates the desktop/laptop OS market.
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| Source: James Schad, The Relentless Rise of the Tech Giants |
And each of them is rumored to be exploring moves into healthcare.
Let's think about a world in which each focused on healthcare as its core business:
Alphabet
Healthcare has lots of information. It supposedly has 30% of the world's stored data. There are several hundred thousand research studies annually. Unfortunately, much of the data is siloed, many of the studies are behind paywalls and/or aimed at only the most hyper-specialized professionals. Most healthcare language is jargon. No one can absorb, understand, or make good use of all this information.
This cries out for a company that can find, make sense of, and communicate the appropriate information to the necessary audience(s). It makes searching the world's libraries look like child's play.
This cries out for Google.
Amazon
Americans are a nation of consumers, and we have the spending to prove it. We spend more on healthcare than anything else, yet do a worse job buying it than we do anything else -- things are too inexpensive, prices are wildly inconsistent, and many things that we buy are of little or even negative value.
We don't really need to find the cheapest HDTV or the cutest sweater, but we do need to find the right healthcare. We need help comparing healthcare prices, clinician quality, and value of treatments. We need help in purchasing healthcare services in ways that are fast and frictionless. We want to go to a healthcare retail location that someone has fully reimagined for us, as Amazon is doing for bookstores or convenience stores.
This cries out for Amazon.
Apple
Healthcare has lots of technology. Most of it is expensive technology, like Defense Department-level expensive ($30 screws? Try $30 aspirins). Unfortunately, little of healthcare technology delights its users, whether those users are clinicians or patients. Interfaces are often epically bad, data doesn't flow yet often doesn't stay private, and we suspect that an industry which still settles for faxes is making technology compromises elsewhere too.
We need healthcare devices that are easy to use. We need healthcare devices that we long to have. We need healthcare devices that are part of an ecosystem that fits together and that communicates well, while keeping our data private. We need healthcare devices that we can count on not to fail us when we need them most.
This cries out for Apple.
Being healthy is hard. It requires developing and maintaining the right habits. Being sick is worse. It is a scary time, full of uncertainty and fear. For both times, we need help, and some of that help must come from our social networks.
We need to find the people in our lives who will inform and support our good health habits. We need to find the people in our lives who have, or have had, similar health challenges, who can tell us what to expect, what to look for, and where to look for it. And we need to be able to provide the same kinds of support for the people in our lives who need it from us.
This cries out for Facebook.
Microsoft
Let's face it: our lives are not well designed to do the kinds of things that will help us keep healthy. Our lives are built for too much sitting, too much eating, too much stress. You could probably design a lifestyle OS aimed at producing worse health results, but it wouldn't be easy.
As Steve Downs called out for his great series, we need to build health into the OS of our lives. We need to make better lifestyle choices, and be more mindful about the impacts on our health. Some of this can be through technology, some of can be through how we structure our daily lives, and some of it has to be through how we view our health.
Through his foundation, Bill Gates is trying to impact health problems in the developing world; Bill, we have a crisis right here. We need a new health OS.
This cries out for Microsoft.
It doesn't have to be all of these, or even any of these. In some ways, it might be better if it were new companies, who are staking their bets that they can become the new tech giants by taking on healthcare.
Either way, I want to see a healthcare system whose tech is envied and emulated by other industries.
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