Fitbit’s recent acquisition of Twine Health has aligned the wearables company closer to clinicians, particularly for monitoring chronic conditions. In a new collaboration with Google, Fitbit is hoping to enhance its healthcare credibility.
Fitbit will use Google’s Cloud services and engineering support to advance its own products. The wearables business also intends to use Google’s new Cloud Healthcare API to help the company connect user data with electronic medical records. By using the Google Healthcare API, Fitbit hopes to accelerate interoperability with existing and future healthcare partners and provide data exchange that can scale to meet large enterprise partner needs. The idea is to give patients and clinicians a more comprehensive view of patient’s health to support more personalized care, according to a news release.
Twine Health’s program is aimed at changing behavior to improve chronic condition management by supporting coaching interactions between health professionals and patients. Although Twine has EMR integration, Fitbit’s collaboration with Google will give it another way to connect user data with electronic medical records, a Fitbit spokeswoman said in an email.
Another wrinkle to this collaboration is that Google and Fitbit will collaborate on both consumer and enterprise products.
One of the Google Cloud resources Fitbit may be interested in rolling up its sleeves and experimenting with is TensorFlow, a machine learning library among researchers across the globe. Clients using TensorFlow gain access to the Tensor Processing Unit to run and scale their models, according to Google Cloud’s website.
Fitbit’s collaboration with Google Cloud follows other healthcare partners since its launch at HIMSS in March including M*Modal, Lahey Health, Cleveland Clinic, and Rush University Medical Center.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The healthcare cloud sector is projected to reach nearly $10 billion by 2021, according to a report last year from Frost & Sullivan.
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