The search giant is looking to monetize its synthetic intelligence for healthcare markets through a new deal with iCAD, a cancer remedies company that plans to license Google Health’s breast cancer threat detection and prediction styles and integrate them into its clinical practice. Using Google’s synthetic intelligence style — and its cloud infrastructure, which I’ll talk about later — can drive adoption of iCAD’s broader cancer screening services, one executive said in a press release.
These partnerships are critical to developing Google Health’s business, Greg Corrado, head of Google Health AI, said in a separate statement.
Commercial
As we reported in 2020, a Google Health study published in Nature warned that the company’s breast cancer screening tool could trip cancer more like it should than doctors. But it’s not yet clear to what extent fitness systems will use the technology, or how simple it is to integrate it into their clinical workflows. (If you have any concepts or anecdote, let us know!)
Speaking of Google’s cloud. . .
Commercial
. . . My colleague Mario Aguilar watched intently as Google showcased its cloud business to hospitals at the HLTH industry convention in Las Vegas. The tech giant is positioning its cloud business as a near-turnkey service that requires little effort for healthcare systems that are concerned with moving their knowledge to the cloud, Mario writes. It’s even starting to sell “accelerators”: ready-to-use packages of knowledge models and dashboards for non-unusual healthcare use cases.
And the company could be ahead of other consumer-focused tech companies interested in dabbling in fitnesscare, especially Amazon, whose expansion has raised concerns in classic fitness systems, Mario writes. Learn more about Mario here.
NIH’s plan to crowdsource Covid-19 outcomes
The National Institutes of Health recently seamlessly introduced an online hub where others can self-report the verification effects of Covid-19 at home, which are not reported elsewhere and are a kind of blind spot for researchers and public fitness departments. MakeMyTestCount. org asks users to report a positive or negative result and the type of verification, as well as fundamental data such as gender and whether they have any symptoms. But it’s not yet clear how the company plans to combat potential issues, such as manufactured verification effects.
Andrew Weitz, who co-leads the effort at NIH, told me that while the site is protected against distributed denial-of-service attacks, as well as multiple repeated attempts to send effects, “perhaps a broader query is how we know that all the effects that other people present are true, and the answer is that we don’t. ” Said. He said the effort is a bit like an experiment, and while it’s somewhat complicated, it can still give researchers and the public fitness departments more data about at-home testing than they have lately.
“We don’t seek to invade anyone’s privacy or become attached to other people,” he said. they went to their doctor and gave them a Covid check, that data is already informed. . . We are only asking others who are willing to share this data themselves to do so voluntarily.
However, the rumor of telehealth merger
Telefitness giant Amwell is reportedly in talks to acquire virtual fitness treatment company Talkspace, according to Israeli publication Calcalist, which reported that the acquisition would cost around $200 million or $1. 50 depending on the stake. Neither Talkspace nor Amwell verified the report. As Mario writes, tech-savvy corporations are facing emerging headwinds as sales decline, and Talkspace in particular has warned investors and analysts since the summer that prospective consumers are postponing decision-making in the face of economic uncertainty.
More Thoughts on the FTC’s Commercial Data Use Investigation
The era of commentary on the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation into industry surveillance and data security ended last week, and we’ve heard a few more comments from you about worst-case scenarios if the use of customer fitness data remains largely unregulated. The Action Center, for example, notes that using apps for situations like substance use disorders or location information indicating visits to harm relief or addiction treatment centers can betray a person’s physical prestige and lead to discrimination and other harm.
And if you have several hours to spare, you can check out the 230-page comment from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which notes that while a customer “prefers to assume that everything they search for on the fitness search site will be protected and limited in the same way that their interactions with their doctor would be. “some internet sites only meet stricter knowledge requirements when running with a fitnesscare provider.
“In reality, healthcare search discloses data about your device, geolocation data, touch data, demographics, and healthcare provider searches to ‘ad networks’ and ‘analytics partners. ‘It can then be targeted and profiled through those unknown third-party companies. , which is a secondary use out of context of your sensitive non-public data.
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