The lingering impact of COVID-19 stoked consumer desire for fast and convenient healthcare services. Now healthcare players are ramping up digital transformation efforts. Four tech giants — Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Amazon (AMZN) — see an excellent opportunity to transform the market with their tech-savvy.
Let’s start with Microsoft. The software giant wants to help providers and payers target specific populations for better health outcomes. In 2021, it acquired Nuance Communications — the largest player in the speech recognition industry — for $19.7 billion. Nuance’s software has been deployed across retail, hospitality, and utilities. Still, healthcare was Microsoft's key motivation.
Nuance already serves about 550,000 users in the medical community. The latest upgrade to the Nuance software — Dragon Ambient Express (DAX) — listens to doctor-patient conversations, records the conversation, synthesizes the critical content of the discussion, and generates clinical notes for the doctor to review. This saves time and will likely result in more accurate clinical notes.
Apple is using consumer-facing products, like the Apple Watch and iPhone, to forge partnerships with payers, health systems, and clinical researchers. Also, if you own an Apple watch, you can monitor your blood pressure anywhere.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, uses its expertise in AI and data storage to help drive the industry-wide push for predictive analytics and personalized medicine — an innovative disease prevention and treatment approach that considers differences in people's genes, environments, and lifestyles.
On the other hand, Amazon is setting up initiatives to transform pharmacy, the medical supply chain, and health insurance. The $1.05 trillion E-commerce giant is also leveraging its delivery power to expand into the medical supplies distribution space. It recently announced a new benefits program for Prime members, offering unlimited access to generic medications for $5 a month.
According to Oxford University’s Business School, few industries are large enough to dent Big Tech’s earnings. Healthcare — a $3 trillion per year market in the U.S. alone — is one such industry. It is also notoriously inefficient, making it a prime target for the data-driven insights Big Tech can deliver.
On the date of publication, Andy Mukolo did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.
