Why Big Tech Failed at Healthcare

The princess. She did an MD/PhD at Stanford

Once upon a time, there was a princess. She went to Stanford and studied medicine and then did a PhD in computer science after getting her MD.

Her father, the king; said “go out and do something useful with your life”.

The princess said:

“I will change the world and make a mobile personal health record that will empower patients by connecting them seamlessly with their healthcare providers’ EHR using FHIR and package it in a mobile app with a beautiful UX for Apple IOS. Patients will be able to share and engage on Instagram”

The queen told her:

“I don’t understand a word of what you said dear, but if it makes you happy — go for it. Just remember — you are an only child and we would love to see successors to the throne by FY 2022. No pressure — but your Dad and I will not be around forever”.

And so it was.

The princess raised some seed money from the royal family office, hired some developer friends from school and a year later launched her app — Royal Clinical — the mobile service that puts in charge of your personal health.

They did all the right things. The used industry standards. The connection between the provider electronic health record (EHR) and Royal Clinical used FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard APIs as defined by the Argonaut Project. They supported data types for allergies, immunizations, lab results, medications, procedures, and vitals out of the box.

The created a seamless connection with the EHR using OAuth 2.0, which allowed users to authenticate using their Google Account and create a persistent connection to the EHR APIs. The Royal clinical app periodically connects to the EHR APIs to pull in any new health records and notified the user when new records are available.

After 3 months — they had 300 downloads. She was dismayed. People are not signing up for my dream. I must be doing something wrong. So — she went out and bought the Lean Startup book and read it and said:

AHAH — I need to do some experiments and ask people what they really want

So she hired Lucifer and they started doing Zoom sessions with people and Lucifer would ask them:

What do you really want in a mobile app for your personal health?

People said — the app is really beautify, but I don’t really want to filter pictures of my shingles on Instagram.

Other users said — umm, this is very cool, but you know, I haven’t been in my doctor’s office for 5 years (unless you count a checkup before the New York Marathon) so there isn’t much to see.

Other users said — when I started getting a fever 3 weeks ago, the app couldn’t help me because my provider’s EHR doesn’t have any data points on low-grade fevers in my health record. So I googled — and it turns out I don’t have Corona. So it’s a really cool app but it’s not really what I need right now. If the app could measure my temperature and give me a quick go/no-go — that would be really useful.

And so she became unsure that the notion of a beautiful mobile UX for Kaiser’s EPIC system was going to change the world.

So she called up one of her professors at the Stanford business school. (she did an MBA while she was doing her internship because her Dad, the king, said it might come in handy some day.

The business school professor said:

The answer is simple. Let’s analyze what the failure of Microsofts Healthvault means for the future of ehrs

1. Microsoft shut down HealthVault Nov 2019. HealthVault was Microsoft’s attempt at a personal health record system.
2. The downfalls of HealthVault included its focus on traditional health records over dynamic and patient-acquired data, its lack of integration with many popular wearables and other smart health devices and its limited social and sharing capabilities. Electronic medical records are an extremely small part of the overall picture of a person’s health today. These records are primarily kept and utilized for the purposes of insurance reimbursement.
3. While the service launched with prominent partners including the American Heart Association, Johnson & Johnson and Allscripts, HealthVault suffered from many of the same issues that felled its competitor Google Health.
4. Google Health’s personal health information service was introduced in 2008 and ended three years later because of low user adoption. Ironically, one of the services suggested by Google when their own record system wound down was HealthVault.

To the chagrin of doctors, electronic medical records are not leveraged for health optimization. Without genomic data, mobile telemetry, health behavior data, and patient-acquired data, today’s electronic medical records are close to worthless for both the provider and the patient.

So the princess googled again and came up with this picture from https://www.statista.com/

There are 249M connected wearables today in China, India and the US alone

And she said — AHAH. Maybe we should start validating data from privacy-preserving contact tracing and give people the ability to make up their own mind. With our beautiful UX and some anomaly detection — I bet we can make something people need — not just what we want.

And so it was.