"Will Silicon Valley Be Your Healthcare Provider One Day? It's Very Likely"

[appalachiablue]

Last edited Wed Jul 15, 2020, 11:43 PM - Edit history (1)

"Will Silicon Valley be your healthcare provider one day? It's very likely." Chinese big tech was at the heart of China’s official response to Covid-19. Now Apple and Google are doing the same in the west. By Christopher Kulendran Thomas, July 14, 2020, The Guardian. - Excerpts, Ed.:

Chinese tech giant Alibaba launched its Taobao app in 2003 at the peak of the Sars epidemic. In January, as the spread of Covid-19 was erupting in China, Taobao introduced an online clinic for coronavirus patients. A month later, Alibaba launched an initiative to supply critical medicines to chronically ill patients across China and is also developing a CT scan algorithm to diagnose Covid-19 within 20 seconds. Alibaba Cloud currently holds the world record for high-precision whole-genome sequencing and is providing free cloud computing and artificial intelligence capabilities to public research institutions for virus gene sequencing and drug development. Meanwhile both Alibaba’s Alipay and competitor TenCent’s WeChat have ‘Health Code’ apps that classify citizens as green, yellow or red, determining each user’s freedom of movement and access to public spaces, with data delivered directly to the police.

Now Apple and Google’s jointly-developed contact tracing technology is set to be adopted by governments throughout much of the rest of the world, potentially marking a new chapter in the balance of power between big tech and the state. Will this lead to an expansion of mass surveillance, like the transformations that followed 9/11? Or will the tech industry be a ballast against exactly that? Quietly, and probably without much debate, this separation of powers will be up for grabs through this pandemic and the new reality that emerges on the other side might be constitutionally quite different.
While stuck at home, we came to rely on private technology companies as the infrastructure for so many of our daily needs – everything from delivering essentials to communicating with colleagues – and now for public health coordination too. But Big Tech’s involvement with healthcare is not new and it won’t end with contact tracing. Since 2018, Amazon has collaborated with investment bank JP Morgan and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway to provide better healthcare, with its own employees as a first market for something that could potentially be made available to the wider population..

Meanwhile Google has invested in over 50 health tech companies and gets access to large amounts of patient data through partnerships with medical centres like the Mayo Clinic in the US. And Apple has trialled its health record system with well over a hundred healthcare institutions, is currently testing out its own primary care clinics (initially with its own employees) and has filed patents for a host of wearable medical devices, with the potential to provide a complete, holistic pre-hospital healthcare and wellness service.

..Longterm, the Silicon Valley vision for healthcare has to do with leveraging machine learning to provide data-led health services that rely more on proactive monitoring than on treatment. The idea is that hyper-responsive medication and preventative lifestyle measures will minimise costly, complex medical procedures.
- Artificial intelligence that continually learns from every patient, everywhere will eventually achieve more accurate diagnoses than expensive humans that have to go to medical school. - And now with the advent of Crispr-based gene editing technologies, cures to many diseases could turn out to be as programmable as computer code. Crucially for tech companies, the more that large amounts of data are brought to bear in the medical field, the more that healthcare will benefit from the economics of software – with low marginal costs across very large populations. When full healthcare is included with Alibaba’s 88VIP, Amazon Prime or Apple Health, these companies will play a central role in providing for the basic wellbeing of their constituents – a responsibility which has typically been the purview of governments. So, if the best healthcare outcomes will be achieved by the organisations that can aggregate the most data, will there even be a viable alternative to the benevolent dictatorship of Apple?...

Full article, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/14/silicon-valley-healthcare-provider-coronavirus

[soothsayer]

1. Well damn