Tech Firms Take Bigger Steps into Health Care

去年夏季患有糖尿病患者的幼儿父母在食品和药物管理局批准为年轻人的患者批准为2.较年轻的患者批准。被称为DEXCOM G5，监视器将血糖数据发送到智能手机应用程序，而不是a单独的接收器，允许患者，父母和医生实时监测葡萄糖读数。这是糖尿病患者的数字革命的最新一步，但它只是基于圣地亚哥的德克斯康的一开始，这在几周前宣布它正在与另一家公司合作，以创造更小和更便宜的监视器。那个公司？谷歌。

It’s no secret that Google has lofty ambitions to change the way the world sees health, in the same way that it disrupted the way people search for information and check e-mail. Google’s Calico project literally hopes to “cure death,” and its Life Sciences unit — recently renamed Verily — is working on various sensors and hardware to impact the discovery and management of disease. But Google’s interest in diabetes, through the Dexcom joint venture and its own in-house work on a glucose-monitoring contact lens, is what some experts say might make or break its foray into health. The industry当天变得更加兴奋，但它仍然可能是令人沮丧的官僚主义，监管机构以比较很多技术高管习惯的步伐速度慢得多。

“The FDA is struggling with how to get pulled into the current world, because as an agency, its first rule is ‘Do no harm,’” says Teresa McRoberts, manager of the Alger Health Sciences Fund at New York–based investment manager Fred Alger Management.

原子能机构开始颁布一些关于在卫生保健应用程序审查的内容的一些规则，这可能会对一些技术创新进行寒意。然而，到目前为止，FDA审查的幽灵已经意味着科技公司从站立的IT公司到初创企业，专注于跟踪和管理数据的软件和产品，大多避免诊断和治疗。

科技公司有很多理由找到一种插入医疗保健世界的方法。医疗保健是美国经济最大的发动机之一，每年产生近3万亿美元，而且Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act，追溯到更高扣除的计划和消费者越来越舒适的转变，跟踪他们吃的东西以及他们如何移动是如何激发许多部门的公司的兴趣。

公司采取如何的最佳人选ge of these changes are those that really understand consumers, says Unity Stoakes, co-founder of StartUp Health, a global network of digital health start-ups that has had a hand in creating more than 100 new companies in the sector since its 2014 launch. Investments include AdhereTech, which has a smart pill bottle to help drugmakers track patients’ medication usage, and Edamam, which provides real-time nutrition analysis and meal recommendation to food and wellness companies. StartUp Health’s goal is to add 1,000 new companies to the digital health market over the next decade.

“医疗保健已经过于复杂;所需要的是市场上的新解决方案，使其变得简单，“Stoakes说。“像Apple这样的公司再次被证明是时间和时间，当您为消费者创造一个美好的经验时，您赢了。”

Apple的Tim Cook强调了公司专注于Apple Watch的医疗保健潜力，并将资源倒入Healthkit和Researchsit，这烹饪预期将在管理临床数据和协助临床试验方面发挥重要作用。但他在11月份采访时说Telegraph而且，他将来没有排除FDA批准的Apple产品，手表本身不会经历这一过程。厨师表示，FDA的迟钝将“持有[公司]从创新开始。”

医疗保健的后端 - 存储，管理和分析应用程序收集的所有数据以及电子医疗记录的膨胀数 - 是许多人认为技术公司将茁壮成长的地方。

IBM的Watson是一种基于云的技术系统，该系统使用机器学习来理解大量信息，在2015年4月推出IBM Watson Health平台后，将重点重点转向健康数据。该倡议迅速导致采集合并医疗保健，医学图像处理器和合资企业，与苹果，CVS健康和约翰逊和约翰逊。IBM在医疗保健数据管理未来投资，它在马萨诸塞州剑桥开设了一家新总部为坎布里奇的沃特森健康。

Somewhere in the middle, between data gathering and management and creating products that might need regulatory approval, are companies like Uber Technologies, which surprised few in the digital health world when it announced a new flu shot delivery service in late 2014. It was a one-day initiative, known as UberHealth, that Uber brought back for an encore last fall to much media attention. Many experts believe is just the beginning of a huge new profit opportunity for the ride-hailing app. Every technology company with the means, it seems, is jumping into the fray.

“Prior barriers to participation in health care were largely based on the fact that the industry is built on really poor technology,” says Rich Gliklich, executive-in-residence with venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners and founder and former CEO and chairman of Outcome, a health IT company acquired in 2011 by Durham, North Carolina–based biopharmaceuticals research firm Quintiles. This need for interoperability is still easy to demonstrate when patients try to acquire copies of their own health records, Gliklich adds. But the barriers are dropping, and with them non–health care companies’ inhibitions about entering and profiting from the growing field.

这些公司是否将在收集和管理数据领域远远超出遥远的问题仍在空中。在原子能机构停止个人基因组学公司23个地区，犹豫不决涉及到FDA监管水域，这是由于担心如何解释的结果，从而销售给消费者的套件两年。拥有23个装备现在的产品，尽管以多种不同的形式，并且实际与Pharma Giant Novartis合作，将葡萄糖监测隐形眼镜带到人类试验中，在2016年的技术世界上许多眼睛将在FDA上。