Google may just be the next big player in the payer realm, Biogen Vice President Adam Koppel said at the recent Harvard Business School Healthcare Conference, according to MedCity News, as the tech giant aims to increase its influence in healthcare data analytics and may even aim to take the place of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Google is attempting to capitalize on the fact that it can pool big data and figure out real-life outcomes in patients, Koppel says, citing the biotechnology company's discussions and data sharing with Google. To that end, the tech company also has multiple partnerships with the life sciences industry for the purpose of generating data and has been making strides in gaining access to patient data through electronic health records.
Given all those factors, Google has made it clear that "they want to take over CMS," Koppel said.
Investments in healthcare by Google Ventures have dramatically increased since 2012, FierceHealthIT has reported. Payers, on the other hand, "are essentially becoming IT companies," Koppel says, as they increasingly mine their own claims data to help improve health outcomes in their members. The only real way to make sense of outcomes data is through big data analytics, he adds, which calls for a deeper intersection between the tech world and the healthcare world.
The article points out, however, that providers and even biopharmaceutical companies may not be willing to hand over their data to a company like Google.
To learn more:
- here is the MedCity News article