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In 2013 my business partner and I consulted with an amazing team to plan a healthcare disruptive solution for the Hong Kong market. Part of this solution entailed storing medical records of patients and make them available through a secure mobile app at their fingertips anytime and anywhere.
The CEO was certainly concerned of privacy: whether the prospect patients would be willing to share their medical records and history with an insurer. Certainly a rightful concern, which could be easily addressed by leveraging on 3rd parties such as Open Data in Hong Kong.
My concerns are mainly 2:
1) Security: your medical information is worth 10 times more than your credit card number on the black market.
Security experts say cyber criminals are increasingly targeting the $3 trillion U.S. healthcare industry, which has many companies still reliant on ageing computer systems that do not use the latest security features.
"As attackers discover new methods to make money, the healthcare industry is becoming a much riper target because of the ability to sell large batches of personal data for profit," said Dave Kennedy, an expert on healthcare security and CEO of TrustedSEC LLC. "Hospitals have low security, so it's relatively easy for these hackers to get a large amount of personal data for medical fraud."
The data for sale includes names, birth dates, policy numbers, diagnosis codes and billing information. Fraudsters use this data to create fake IDs to buy medical equipment or drugs that can be resold, or they combine a patient number with a false provider number and file made-up claims with insurers, according to experts who have investigated cyber attacks on healthcare organisations.
Medical identity theft is often not immediately identified by a patient or their provider, giving criminals years to milk such credentials. That makes medical data more valuable than credit cards, which tend to be quickly canceled by banks once fraud is detected.
Stolen health credentials can go for $10 each, about 10 or 20 times the value of a U.S. credit card number, according to Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence at PhishLabs, a cyber crime protection company. He obtained the data by monitoring underground exchanges where hackers sell the information.
Today is the last day of Hacking Health, in collaboration with Open Data Hong Kong, will host its first hackathon in Asia. Hacking Health Hong Kong is presented by AXA and took place at CoCoon, one of Hong Kong’s largest entrepreneurial hubs.
Physicians, specialists, nurses, and other health professionals will collaborate with computer scientists, designers, engineers, and technologists to create innovative solutions to healthcare problems that impact patients and health care workers in Hong Kong and around the world. The teams will work closely together throughout the weekend to build working software prototypes designed to address critical healthcare issues, which will be demonstrated on the final day.
In this unique series of hackathons, Hacking Health gives healthcare professionals and hospital workers the opportunity to turn their ideas into working software and hardware for testing, demonstration, and inspiration. Technical and design professionals have the rare opportunity to collaborate in a fun, lowpressure atmosphere on real life medical problems brought to them by frontline healthcare professionals.
Are you going to put money into a brand new MRI machine or laser surgery or are you going to put money into a new firewall?
let`s see if security of medical records storage and upgrade of systems will be addressed by the AXA hosted Hacking Health 3 days final presentations.
2) Incumbents / New Entrants (i.e. the Tech Titans, and "new" digital healthcare providers)
In a world where older and very established brands are succumbing (or struggling to keep afloat) to digital entrants (for instance Visa &MasterCard Vs PayPal) , due to technology change drivers, and consumers such as millennials and Gen Z`s trust for older establishment of brands Vs the Google and Apple of this era is not yet earned.
These tech titans, or even smarter healthcare providers such as Oscar in NYC, have established brand`s trust very quickly, especially with the new generations who used their products for free (or perceived so) or because their products and service are so appealing; and with at the advent of wearable technologies, which soon will shorten the Bell curve from early adopters to lifestyle lovers, therefore quick mass consumption.
This is only the infancy stage of how the future of the healthcare industry will be revolutionised by Big Data and coupled with the proliferation and fast adoption of sensors and devices such as wearable technologies from tech to lifestyle to sport consumer groups - beyond patients - with an increasing awareness and consciousness of wellness and healthcare.
Apple has secured major alliances to lay out HealthKit's foundations.
EHR companies Epic, Cerner (NASDAQ: CERN ) , and Athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN ) will connect their patient records to HealthKit. Epic and Cerner account for more than three-fourths of all EHRs in America, according to KLAS Research. HealthKit synchronizes data from iOS fitness apps and wearables into the iOS 8 Health app, and integrates health data from Mayo Clinic. Apple believes that the Apple Watch, which will arrive next year, will synchronize an individual's biometric data to this vast network.
Apple envisions a future where a person's health data flows freely from an Apple Watch to an iPhone to a doctor's screen, putting everyone on the same page and eradicating medical errors and confusion. While that's a grand vision, there are two factors which could throttle HealthKit's growth.
First, HIPAA regulations, which are designed to protect patient records, will inevitably become a bottleneck which HealthKit apps and devices have to squeeze through to reach doctors. Security concerns, like those recently seen with iCloud (which Apple bans HealthKit data from) could prevent cautious users from logging their health data into the Health app.
Second, Apple's market share is the ultimate limit for HealthKit's market penetration. Apple controls 42% of the U.S. smartphone market, according to comScore, which makes it the ideal starting point for its healthcare efforts. But Apple only controls 12% of the global market, compared to 85% for Google Android, according to IDC -- indicating that Apple's efforts to digitize the health care industry will remain confined to less than half of the U.S. market.
In comparison to Apple's focused strategy, Google's healthcare efforts are focused on longer-term goals.
Back in 2008, Google tried to create a unified personal health record for individuals, known as Google Health, by forging partnerships with EHR companies. However, Google shut down Health four years later due to a lack of participation from doctors and privacy concerns. Since then, Google hasn't tried to unify EHRs, as Apple is now doing with HealthKit.
Instead, Google is aiming much higher. Last September, it launched Calico, a biotech subsidiary focused on age-related diseases. Earlier this month, AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV ) signed a research partnership worth up to $1.5 billion with Calico to develop new drugs. Earlier this year, Google unveiled a smart contact lens which detects blood glucose levels through tears, which Novartis (NYSE: NVS ) licensed in July. That same month, Google launched Project Baseline, an anonymized genetic database to identify biomarkers related to common diseases.
In hospitals, Google Glass is gaining momentum as a hands-free device for doctors. Several hospitals have started using Glass to streamline everyday routines, while smaller companies like Augmedix and Drchrono are streaming EHRs to Glass' heads-up display. In the consumer-facing market, Google has launched Android Wear, a scaled down version of Android for smartwatches, and will soon launch Google Fit, a unified dashboard for Android fitness apps and wearables.
In conclusion, Google's efforts are different from Apple's because they are focused on the future, rather than the present.
Calico and Project Baseline probably won't generate revenue over the next few years, but if Calico eventually launches a blockbuster drug, or Baseline becomes the "Google Search of DNA" for hospitals and life science companies, they could help Google straddle the tech and biotech industries -- something that Apple could only dream of doing.
Apple's HealthKit is a fascinating platform, but investors should realize that it faces a lot of questions regarding privacy, security, and public acceptance before it can realize the company's dream of tethering patients and doctors to the cloud with iOS devices.
Apple recently revealed the product of its secret-development "dream team" - Apple Watch. The secret is out, and some early viewers are claiming its everyday impact could trump the iPod, iPhone, and the iPad. In fact, ABI Research predicts 485 million of this type of device will be sold per year. But one small company makes Apple's gadget possible. And its stock price has nearly unlimited room to run for early in-the-know investors. To be one of them, and see where the real money is to be made.
