A review of technology giants’ healthcare collaborations

Healthcare in the 21(st) century has become more dependent on technologies than ever before). The cultural transformation called digital health has brought a range of advanced technologies into the practice of medicine and the delivery of healthcare. This has led to a rise of consumerism, an approach that would put the interests of the patients on top of those of healthcare or medical professionals in general. Companies that have traditionally been involved with developing medications, medical technologies and biotech inventions, have started to turn to developing digital health-related solutions and products. This is the change in healthcare that has started to attract companies that have never been involved with this industry. Companies like Amazon, Google (and their parent company, Alphabet), Microsoft, NVIDIA, IBM, Apple and Samsung would primarily fall into this category. Technology giants have clear incentives to enter the healthcare market as patients and medical professionals turn more to technological products to obtain, access and analyze health and medical data. However, without precious healthcare data, tech giants face a challenge in developing relevant technologies that could be implemented in the clinical practice, therefore they started to collaborate with healthcare institutions that traditionally own and store such health data. We reviewed those collaborations between tech giants and healthcare institutions that have been made public to provide a picture about the nature of these collaborations and their purposes. Our goal was to shed light on the potential privacy consequences as well as the technological advantages of tech giants’ collaborating with healthcare institutions. To our knowledge, this is the first review of such collaborations in the medical literature.