Posted by Mia Israel · Feb 05, 2018 at 1:44 PM

Podcast on Amazon's Healthcare Annoucement

The latest episode of the podcast Exponent explores Amazon's healthcare announcement and why the industry is so challenging.

From a joint press release from Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan Chase:

"Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced today that they are partnering on ways to address healthcare for their U.S. employees, with the aim of improving employee satisfaction and reducing costs. The three companies, which bring their scale and complementary expertise to this long-term effort, will pursue this objective through an independent company that is free from profit-making incentives and constraints. The initial focus of the new company will be on technology solutions that will provide U.S. employees and their families with simplified, high-quality and transparent healthcare at a reasonable cost.

Tackling the enormous challenges of healthcare and harnessing its full benefits are among the greatest issues facing society today. By bringing together three of the world’s leading organizations into this new and innovative construct, the group hopes to draw on its combined capabilities and resources to take a fresh approach to these critical matters…"

Listen to Episode 139 — Amazon and Health Care from Exponent in Podcasts.

What do you think of this "fresh approach" to healthcare? Leave a comment below!

Comments & Events

Eric Bakota, Public Health Analyst

I'm not sure if these 3 companies will be able to 'disrupt' healthcare or not, but this isn't the first time the tech sector has tried to make inroads into healthcare (see Google Health) and, so long as healthcare continues to be 1/6th of the American economy, it won't be the last. If healthcare is as inefficient as almost everyone claims it is, then eventually a technology giant will crack the riddle and costs will plummet rapidly. That will create its own set of problems as there would be massive dislocations in the healthcare sector.

Tech and other industry titans can disrupt things because of their near-monopoly on the most important resource in the world: data. Their ability to consume data and extract information is unimaginably impressive. However, this data collection is often used for the important, but unimpressive pursuit of profit. A quote by Jeff Hammerbacher sums it up well: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” And disregard whatever they say about this venture being 'free' from profit making incentives/constraints. The profits are realized by the parent companies, who are looking for lowered costs and not improved population health.

Public health can take advantage of this. We need to partner more often with the private sector, especially those we don't traditionally partner with, if we want to continue being experts in population health. Fifty years ago state health departments, local health departments, and CDC owned all the population level data for cancer, reportable conditions, and vital statistics. We were a 1 stop shop for population data. Eventually, I think, Google, Facebook, and Amazon will overtake public health as population data experts. They will soon have the capacity to correlate an individual’s health status based on his or her internet behavior and then aggregate and marry that dataset to its tables of incredibly rich social & economic data it surely has for all communities. So Public health epis must find a way to partner with tech giants and get them to see the value and importance of sharing their data.

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Feb 05, 2018 at 7:05 PM Notified 113 people