Healthy digitease

Internet commerce and entertainment juggernaut Amazon spent the better part of the last few years wielding its considerable technology cache, capital, influence and market perception venturing into the healthcare industry.

Much of the tech giant’s banner-waving drives centered on clinical product fulfillment — essentially, ordering, purchasing and distribution of drugs and medical/surgical supplies in addition to an overly publicized healthcare “gated community” with Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase. Such moves elicited veiled and not-so-veiled protests by distributors, group purchasing organizations, healthcare systems and hospital chains that felt threatened by a resurgent “disintermediation discord.”

Please. That’s low-hanging fruit. Think of it as the 12-play run-and-short-pass drive to the end zone for the touchdown, typical strategies of the hard-core pro football teams east of the Mississippi River.

Back in November, however, Amazon switched to more of a western-style offense, rooted in razzle-dazzle, no-huddle plays and long passes. Higher fruit.

Arguably, Amazon seems to have snatched up the ball fumbled by IBM Watson Health, looking to sprint away with the baton in a high-stakes healthcare datathon, mixed sports metaphor intended.

Several years ago, IBM invested more than $4 billion to acquire a quartet of companies — Merge Healthcare, Cleveland Clinic spinoff Explorys, Phytel and Truven — to bolster its Watson Health initiative around what it called “cognitive computing.” In a nutshell, IBM Watson Health wanted to mine as much collective healthcare data (from provider and payer sources with permission) to direct and influence clinical procedures, healthcare policy and product development and population health. Honestly, this maneuver represented an ambitious — yet brilliant — strategy on behalf of Big Blue, which largely had been dark and silent since unloading its personal computer-making assets to Lenovo in 2004.

Who knew that this storied but staid blue-chip company, which had lost its luster and bluster to publicly bedazzled Apple, would spend the next two decades finagling a master plan worthy of a resurgent James Bond villain? To accurately quote a famous literary detective: “Elementary!” (P.S. Sherlock Holmes never uttered the popularized phrase, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” in any of the stories by author Arthur Conan Doyle.)

Since those major acquisitions, however, IBM Watson Health seems to have retreated to its development lair. Reports indicated that the company shifted strategies and changed direction, a disappointing decision that led to the premature demise of a splashy healthcare consulting venture borne out of an East Coast healthcare provider.

Now it’s Amazon’s turn to plunge into the healthcare datapalooza with its Amazon Comprehend Medical cloud-based software, which is designed to analyze health system “metadata,” including clinician notes, EHR and EMR records for the similar purposes of IBM Watson’s aims — clinical decision support, revenue cycle management, clinical trials management and population health management, according to the company. Hopefully, benevolence and magnanimity drives these efforts more than revenue generation and profiteering or the company might feel some of the wrath levied at Facebook of late.

Amazon’s data mining tentacle represents more of an evolutionary development than a revolutionary one. Why? A bevy of companies have tried to make sense of the Wild, Wild West of data formatting since the online realm gained a chokehold on business transactions and data transmission two decades ago. Either way, Amazon’s latest endeavor signals slow progress, if not a work-in-progress.

The bluff in all of this is the surprising fundamental fear of accurate data — an egregious error tacitly accepted by providers, suppliers, payers and regulators. Until some entity — be it a “private” regulatory body or public agency — forces the standardization of data attributes and characteristics and requires universal adoption and implementation so that everyone is communicating in the same language, then all we’re doing is shuffling deck chairs on a cruise ship sailing in circles.