By Wendy Netter Epstein and Charlotte Tschider
This May, Google announced a new partnership with national hospital chain HCA Healthcare to consolidate HCA’s digital health data from electronic medical records and medical devices and store it in Google Cloud.
This move is the just the latest of a growing trend — in the first half of this year alone, there have been at least 38 partnerships announced between providers and big tech. Health systems are hoping to leverage the know-how of tech titans to unlock the potential of their treasure troves of data.
Health systems have faltered in achieving this on their own, facing, on the one hand, technical and practical challenges, and, on the other, political and ethical concerns.