Amazon Moves Further Into Health Care Data, Sharp Deal Shows

 

by Peter Johnson

Health care industry insiders say that Amazon.com Inc.'s Aug. 27 deal to provide Halo fitness trackers to Sharp HealthCare indicates the retail and tech giant will make big bets on clinical and actuarial data analytics.

Sharp Chief Information and Innovation Officer Michael Reagin says that Amazon will provide the San Diego-based integrated plan and provider with about 500 of the wearable fitness trackers.

Sharp will use the devices in two pilot programs, Reagin says. The company will give "about 100" Halos to clinicians, who will wear them in order to track staff performance and prevent burnout. Reagin says the Halo's much-discussed voice monitoring technology is an essential element of the clinician-focused effort.

The rest of the devices will go to Sharp Health Plan members for remote monitoring purposes.

Michael Abrams, co-founder and managing partner of health care consultancy Numerof & Associates, says that member engagement will be essential to the pilot program's success. He says that remote monitoring can be stifled if patients don’t fully buy in.

Since the Halo will continually monitor members without any action in their part, Abrams is optimistic that the program will enjoy better adherence than other remote monitoring efforts.

"If plans can get member adoption and perseverance, this could be a great tool for seeing high-level, aggregated community trends and identifying specific interventions," says Rajshri Ravi, the head of product and technology at ConsejoSano. "Population health management is all about data: the more, the better. It depends on how they use the data. Propensity modeling could predict member behavior and offer insights to increase retention."

Friso van Reesema, a senior account executive for Eliza, Elli and Essette Solutions, says that Amazon is uniquely well-positioned to offer health plans technology and services that will process that data.

"In the next three years, we're going to see some really exciting artificial intelligence and improvement of these platforms that are leveraging these devices to power the platform and be able to roll out exciting algorithms, whether they're retrospective, prospective, prescriptive," van Reesema says.

He adds that the deal is likely an attempt by the tech giant to start training its AIs on population health models using data gathered from the Halo pilot.

From Health Plan Weekly