New collaboration between six tech giants to improve disease treatment
Google, Amazon, and IBM have joined forces with Microsoft, Salesforce and Oracle in a bid to accelerate the progress of health data standards and interoperability. Commenting on this, data and analytics company GlobalData has said that the collaboration will lead to enormous advances in artificial intelligence and, ultimately, to earlier diagnoses and better treatments at reduced costs.
“This big new alliance’s pledge will have a very positive impact on healthcare as it will become easier to share medical data among hospitals. Both physicians and patients will have easier access to information, which will lead to faster diagnosis and treatment. In the same time, the six tech giants will eventually profit from speeding up their AI research,” said Dr Valentina Gburcik, CVMD Director at GlobalData. “In particular, this deal is good news for the companies’ AI sectors. If health data is fully standardised and interoperable, the ‘smarter’ AI can progress faster. Breaking down barriers between chunks of big data will create extremely large datasets, allowing extensive machine learning to boost AI effectiveness and revolutionize healthcare systems.”
A letter issued by the Information Technology Industry Council that has been signed by all six of the tech giants states that they are jointly committed to removing barriers to the adoption of technologies for healthcare interoperability. The letter also states that the tech giants will base the alliance on four foundational assumptions: the first is about frictionless and safe exchange of healthcare data; the second covers healthcare data interoperability; the third looks at open standards, open specifications and open source tools; and the fourth is about commitment to actively engage ‘among open source and open standards communities for the development of healthcare standards, and conformity assessment to foster agility to account for the accelerated pace of innovation’.