The acquisition is still pending FTC review, but it is far from being the only Big Tech push in the healthcare space. A week after the One Medical deal, Alphabet’s AI subsidiary DeepMind ‘transformed biology’ by announcing a new tool that could predict the structure of nearly all known proteins, a feat that promises to accelerate drug development and revolutionize basic science research. DeepMind released the tool via a free open access platform, describing it as a ‘Google search’ for protein structures.

These two stories highlight how comprehensive the impact of tech on the healthcare continuum will be. DeepMind’s contribution will be felt upstream in laboratories and R&D units tackling problems including antimicrobial resistance, plastic pollution or tropical diseases, while Amazon’s will be felt in the humdrum logistics of delivering care to patients. Alibaba and Uber are also both venturing into healthcare logistics.

The sector desperately needs more - and better - technology. DeepMind’s protein tool gives researchers a powerful weapon to push back a long-term decline in biomedical innovation productivity, helping tackle stubborn diseases like cancer and dementia which are yet to yield to a cure despite billions of research spending. For its part, Amazon’s unrivaled ability to simplify complexity, please customers, and lower costs could be good news for a sector that consumes up to a fifth of GDP in the US, where per capita spending is far higher than any other OECD country even as US life expectancy keeps falling. Four in ten US adults say they have delayed or gone without medical care in the last year due to cost.

It is not the only OECD country struggling. Backlogs and delays in non-emergency healthcare caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have left millions of people without care in virtually all EU countries, according to a recent study by the WHO. In England, the backlog has risen so fast in some segments (up to 365x in two years) that the government had to increase taxes to pay for the investments needed.

Big Tech companies have the tools to help. Cloud computing services enable hospitals and clinics to modernize their legacy IT infrastructures and reduce data silos that lead to unnecessary bureaucracy and errors, for example. Clinical trials can be optimized with AI, which can scour data like electronic health records to select the most appropriate patient cohort, while consumer electronics are becoming clinical research assets – witness for example the Johnson & Johnson trial of the iPhone to detect atrial fibrillation, just one of many smartphone-based clinical investigations into diagnostics.

But the sector’s complexity has obstructed Big Tech forays in the past. The launch of Haven back in 2018, an ambiguous but high profile initiative to ‘lower healthcare costs’ in partnership with Berkshire Hathaway, JP Morgan and Amazon caused healthcare stocks to swoon at first for fear a disruption was coming. It disbanded three years later, rebuffed by a sector deemed too entrenched (as well as some rumored management failings). Amazon Care, a virtual health service initially developed for the company’s workforce and subsequently extended to external clients like the hotel chain Hilton, will also shut down at the end of this year.

Social considerations also abound. Google Health sparked controversy last year when patient data protocols were breached during the testing of Streams, a clinician support app; the collaboration was discontinued. Equally important are the equity considerations of applying a gig economy model to something as critical as healthcare.

Yet the challenges facing healthcare call for best-in-class capabilities in the frontiers of AI, cloud computing and digital technology. At times, public opposition to the tech industry’s involvement is caused by misinformation, poor communication, and lack of transparency, rather than a hidden agenda. DeepMind’s decision to release their new tool on an open access basis, even though the company was loss making till last year and Alphabet is looking to cut costs, is a sign of a company committed to a societal rather than financial mission. The key question is how countries, regulators, and the public balance the dire need for better tech with the ever-expanding power of the companies that built it.

Big Tech Takes on Big Health