I "love" how Google just throws in "rare diseases" in to this, via their press release, as somebody who lives with 2 rare diseases that affect my peripheral nervous system. Actually, one of the diseases I have was discovered in the early 2000s on NIH grant funds at the Mayo Clinic.
This sounds wild, but it is true: Rare diseases are an absolute cash cow, and everyone should watch this. Our healthcare system in the US will be unsustainable if orphan drugs are not regulated (Which is why I naturalized as an European Union citizen, in addition to being American. I fret and worry about getting proper access to medical care every single day.): https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/the-weekly/rare-diseases-...
(I do not believe that healthcare for all is unsustainable, but an unregulated free market will make it unsustainable.)
Just in case anyone was wondering, it is common to have a rare disease, and they are unfathomly expensive to have. In the US, the definition of rare disease (which really should be called "orphan conditions" based on the law) is tied to "orphan drugs" which in theory can collectively benefit 10% of the general population. There are a ton of orphan drugs being approved at the moment, which cost between hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to millions per year, in the US. The European estimate on rare diseases is more realistic and 6-8% of the general population has a rare disease.
So, do not think think that it cannot happen to you. You are naive to believe otherwise.
Glad to see the companies we know and love getting into healthcare:
Amazon: People who shopped for MRIs also shopped for...
Facebook: You have been tagged in this x-ray...
Apple: Glucose Monitor Pro, starting at $999/$42 monthly (gold/64GB, Apple Pencil and iCloud storage sold separately...)
Google/YouTube: Dr. Oz, Stephen Fry, and Ben Shapiro DESTROY healthcare in amazing TEDx talk...
I’m pretty excited about this. Although it’s in Rochester it will boost the MN tech scene. There’s a lot of opportunity here for Google to learn about healthcare as well. Their AI tools should help improve outcomes. I can think of half a dozen promising projects just based on the current scientific literature. I don’t think google is going after EHRs here. Epic is too dominate. Also google could just buy an EHR company if they really wanted to get into that space. Interestingly Epic is pitching AI tools as well.
The article is a PR announcement without much substance.
What AI projects? What part of the cloud platform will they use? What will it be used for?
It sounds like a nice partnership, but it's not clear what Mayo will be doing with it
Just in case anyone didn't spot it, yesterday Apple announced Research.app that will let Apple Watch users opt in to supplying data to research projects
https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2019/09/apple-announces-th...
Three projects announced at the moment.
I feel fairly comfortable with these, since they are opt in and not aimed at users who are suffering a healthcare crisis while deciding whether to share their data.
Buzzwords aplenty, but not one word about what this does for patients. Count me skeptical.
Interesting decision considering Mayo is an Epic customer, and Epic has their own cloud AI product. I guess Mayo doesn't have much confidence in them to deliver?
This doesn't seem good for anyone but Google.
I have worked on medical/improving patient outcomes consulting projects three or four times - enough to get a feeling for how difficult it is to accomplish all of: keep patient data private, convince data partners to spend the resources to sanitize data, share benefit of research amount partners, and work with different data formats.
I heard a keynote at NACL a few years ago that was a call to arms to solve these problems.
Pure word salad. This is what you get when you import executives from Hell^WOracle.
Healthcare has many forces driving less than optimal outcomes.
The for profit status of treatment in "western" medicine.
Laws like HIPPA that are well intention-ed, but written by lobbyists and out of field and out of date lawyers/politicians who don't understand the actual nature of data protection or the need for a patient to be in control of their medical records in meaningful ways.
There's also the lack of a national / international identity and legal / data security infrastructure: this makes it very difficult to associate government issued IDs to patient records and requests / authorizations for limited sharing of those records.
In a less crazy world the outcome might look something like this:
Everyone has a Digital ID; this is a government issued or signed PKI based contract approval key. It would be stored in a dedicated, open hardware, firmware and software, wallet that is used only for making strong signatures.
The Digital ID allows the patient to log in to government websites and associate their healthcare coverage (ideally single payer, but if they're rich and have a luxury plan that could be linked as well) at various medical centers to their (emergency) care records. They can also actively choose to, or passively allow, the sharing of specific records from one provider to anyone else, as well as obtain personal copies of all of their records from all of their providers. Any time a provider is no longer covering a given patient stewardship of those records transfers to the government agency providing this service (and is paid for out of a general fund based on taxing providers so they don't have to deal with this).
A management matrix might also allow for general records access approval, in the case that the patient just wants their entire medical history and ongoing updates to be provided to their pool of physicians.
Through that framework outside entities can also obtain access keys and links for the records at other providers which they are authorized to view the records at.
Also; of course, all of the records would be required to be in "open, patent free, free to implement record formats as standardized by the medical industry software and equipment providers"; a specific format wouldn't be legally mandated, but the use of formats that are intended to be interchangeable would be.
Is google going to sell data obtained from this collaboration to the advertizers? Insurance companies?
Hopefully, we get specific information about what Google Cloud will be doing with Mayo Clinic to better patient outcomes - the article is filled with handwaving.
Please don't.
And here I was hoping for cost-reduction plans. Undoubtedly the cloud service provisioning will do the exact opposite.
Google Deepmind x The Royal Free hospital didn't quite go as planned, Information Governance wise.
Maybe start with transforming the "present" of marketing, and avoid hyperbole?
Sheesh. “All your data are belong to us” gets more toxic every day.
Color me cynical, but 20-25 years ago companies were touting what the "future of healthcare" looked like.
They, and the people they were marketing to, would have been appalled if at the time they could have seen at what it became. At least in the United States.
Well they could hardly change the past of healthcare....
tldr; US clinic hands over millions of patients records.
They won’t.
Sorry for the cynicism, but this worries me.
> This strategic partnership will combine Google’s cloud and AI capabilities and Mayo’s world-leading clinical expertise to improve the health of people—and entire communities—through the transformative impact of understanding insights at scale. Ultimately, we will work together to solve humanity’s most serious and complex medical challenges.
I'm sorry but this is just pure silicon valley speak. Are Mayo's patients really going to know what Google is doing with their clinical data? When I hear "partnering with Google to create machine-learning models for serious and complex disease", I have a hard time believing Mayo patients know what they are signing away when they consent to this (if at all, which is not mentioned?)