Apple and Amazon’s moves in health signal a coming transformation - Surgical intervention (The Economist)

Diagnosis: disruption

"Until now the tech giants’ foray into health care has not gone much beyond wearable devices to track fitness or the provision of cloud-computing services to incumbent providers. In future they aim to deliver real medical services that directly affect individual patients. All five firms have secretive health-care skunk works, are hiring medical talent and are buying or backing external health-care startups. Undeterred by recent claims that their own products may be harmful to mental health, they want not only to be indispensable in customers’ lives but to prolong them, too.

The revenues of the industries they could disrupt are enormous. Health-care costs make up about a tenth of any country’s GDP on average, worth in total $7trn in 2015, according to Deloitte, a consultancy. Two insurers, UnitedHealth Group and CVS Health, are among America’s largest firms by revenue, bringing in $185bn and $178bn respectively in 2016. That is more than any tech firm except Apple. Shares in the two insurers fell by 4% on the news of the new Amazon-led health venture."

Apple and Amazon’s moves in health signal a coming transformation - Surgical intervention