As personnel moves go, the hiring of Amy Abernethy by Verily is about as big as it gets in digital health care. It signals the Alphabet-backed company’s ambition to fundamentally reshape clinical research, making participation easier and drugs more effective. Abernethy, an oncologist by training, is credited with modernizing the way the Food and Drug Administration uses and manages data as the former number two at the agency.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, it's become not only acceptable but recommended that we wash our hands frequently, as per Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines. That is, any time we're in a public place and before or after touching our face. That includes after pumping gas, opening the mailbox, touching door handles—it's endless, and it won’t end when everyone’s vaccinated and we start to recover from the pandemic.
“Now we’ve got electronic medical records, huge volumes of data, and this is like asking a navigation system from a World War I airplane to navigate us up to the space shuttle,” Arthur Kaplan, a professor at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, told CNBC. On Wednesday, Google’s cloud unit and hospital chain HCA Healthcare announced a deal that — according to The Wall Street Journal — gives Google access to patient records. “Maybe they don’t have your name, but they sure enough can figure out what sub-group, sub-population might do best by getting advertised to you,” Kaplan said.
Despite Scripps Health saying the online system should be back up later this week, many patients have complained of canceled appointments and surgeries.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google and national hospital chain HCA Healthcare Inc. have struck a deal to develop healthcare algorithms using patient records, the latest foray by a tech giant into the $3 trillion healthcare sector. Nashville, Tenn.,-based HCA, which operates across about 2,000 locations in 21 states, would consolidate and store with Google data from digital health records and internet-connected medical devices under the multiyear agreement. Google and HCA engineers will work to develop algorithms to help improve operating efficiency, monitor patients and guide doctors’ decisions, according to the companies.