Big Data and Healthcare

Data is the currency that fuels the digital economy.  What websites we visit, what items we purchase, even what we look at on Instagram – it’s all information companies collect and distribute every day to better understand consumers and what they want.  It’s become such a ubiquitous aspect of consumer life in the twenty-first century that finding the idea of search engines collating all the data they’ve collected and selling it to private concerns distasteful is almost quaint.  You might not like all your data being collected, but what are you going to do about it?  Stop searching for things on Google or buying things from Amazon?  The convenience companies like this provide trumps the desire for personal privacy. Still, you’d think there would be a line that people wouldn’t be willing to cross where privacy is concerned, and that line could very well be drawn at the confluence of big data and healthcare.

Healthcare is the next frontier in big data and consumer electronics. According to Pitchbook, venture capitalists invested 10.8 billion dollars in healthcare-related sectors like biotechnology and genetics in 2017, easily surpassing the previous year’s total. Wearable technology, in particular, has crossed the Rubicon into the world of health and well-being. The Apple Watch’s most prominent feature is a heart monitor that can act like a rudimentary electrocardiogram, screening its wearer for irregular heartbeats and other cardiovascular abnormalities.  Fitbit, the San Francisco-based wearable tech company whose brand is most associated with healthcare tech, recently announced it will be acquired early next year by Google for 2.1 billion dollars, a significant investment even for a company with pockets as deep as Google’s.  Google also spent 40 million dollars earlier this year in exchange for technology and engineers from watchmaker Fossil Group.

On the face of it, these acquisitions seem like a fairly straight forward commitment to a burgeoning tech sector. After all, Google makes phones now – why not wearable tech with health-monitoring capabilities? Fitbit has already made significant inroads with other healthcare companies and health insurance providers – they even have a likely lucrative agreement with the public health department of Singapore to provide healthcare monitoring for the country’s aging, heart-health conscious population. For a tech company looking to make a move into healthcare, acquiring Fitbit seems like a no-brainer. Still, Google’s primary revenue source is targeted advertising, and targeted advertising requires data to hone in on each individual’s “consumer profile.” In that sense, Fitbit’s true value to Google might be in the data the company has collected from its users over the last decade plus.

Knowledge of the particular health metrics of millions of individual users has the potential to be just as valuable as online browsing and purchasing histories. Users that aren’t getting as much exercise as they should can be steered towards gyms or home fitness equipment, while people with high caloric intakes can be offered recommendations on nutritional systems or diet plans. Brand names like Peloton, Bowflex and CrossFit could all be big beneficiaries of a world in which personal health information is treated like a commodity. The lingering doubt remains, however… will users be comfortable with this kind of information being made available to companies trying to sell you things? People have had to accept incursions into their privacy for the sake of convenience since the dawn of the internet, but these forays into our private lives have never gotten as far as the doctor’s office.If the failed experiment that was Google Glass taught us anything, it’s that consumers like ISPs and the internet available at a moment’s notice – but still at arm’s length. By acquiring FitBit, Google is ignoring that dictum and getting even closer to its users, and only time will tell whether that bet ultimately pays off.