Health IT

Why Apple and Google are good for healthcare… and Uber is not.

Grand Rounds Health CEO Owen Tripp on Uber's entrance into healthcare? "It's a little goofy."

Uber Health

It’s not just the platitude “it’s the Uber of healthcare!” that we simply must kill.

Right now, the wildly popular ride share company’s involvement in healthcare is pretty dubious overall, says a panel of digital health experts at this week’s J.P. Morgan healthcare conference in San Francisco.

When discussing Silicon Valley’s entrance into the healthcare landscape, the consensus was that Apple’s, and particularly Google’s, presence is a good thing.

“They’ll push interoperability, and if they’re successful, there will be a rising tide of lots of folks who will benefit from their economic leverage,” said Owen Tripp, CEO of Grand Rounds Health.

Companies like Uber, however, are distracting the conversation, he said.

“Having raised billions and billions of dollars and being one of the most well-used services in the U.S., the best thing you can do is think about home delivery of kittens and doctors – sometimes simultaneously?” Tripp joked. “It’s a little goofy.”

Uber Health is attempting to bring the house call back into business – providing a concierge service that ferries flu shots to individuals unwilling to head to, say, their local Walgreens. It has also teamed up with hospital systems like Maryland’s MedStar Health, providing rides for patients to visit their doctors – because transportation, it says, is often cited as a reason for missed appointments.

“I think there are definitely companies that are noising up the space right now that probably have no business being healthcare companies,” said Deborah Kilpatrick of Evidation Health, building on Tripp’s comments on Uber. “But I have a strong opinion that as Google and Apple are getting into healthcare, they have something very profound to teach all of us that have been in healthcare for a long time.”

Of course, it’s questionable whether or not Apple’s a proponent of interoperability – but tools like ResearchKit, in particular, show great promise in providing a fresh way to look at consent, said Aledade CEO Farzad Mostashari.

And Google (Alphabet) has become a full-blown healthcare company in its own right – particularly with the launch of Verily and Verb Surgical. The tech industry, in short, is bringing a fresh set of eyes to the wheezing dinosaur of a healthcare system we have in place.

Google and Apple know how to think of people as “consumers of something in their daily lives,” Kilpatrick said – which is quite different from how the healthcare industry has traditionally handled its patients.

“What I want Google and Apple to do is to incorporate [healthcare information] into people’s daily workflows,” Mostashari said. “I want this in my Google Now feed. I want this in my calendar. It’s the integration that’s wonderful.”

[Image courtesy of Uber Health]

 

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