By Melanie Evans
Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google are
striking sweeping agreements to store data and develop software for
hospitals, as the technology giants wrestle for control in
health-care and cloud-computing markets.
Google will announce Tuesday a 10-year deal with the Mayo Clinic
to store the hospital system's medical, genetic and financial data.
Providence St. Joseph Health in July said it reached a data-storage
agreement with Microsoft. Later that month, Cerner Corp., one of
the largest electronic-health-record companies, unveiled its
cloud-storage agreement with Amazon's cloud-computing unit, Amazon
Web Services.
Some hospital-system and company officials said they expect to
jointly develop new software by combining data and expertise of
health-care companies with tech giants' computing power and
engineering know-how. "Google can't do this alone. We can't do this
alone," said Cris Ross, Mayo's chief information officer. The terms
weren't disclosed.
Patient records will be kept private and access will be
controlled by Mayo, Mr. Ross said.
Data analysis can identify undetected patterns that will help
with insights into disease, said Mr. Ross. Many algorithms in
development seek to improve the speed or accuracy of tests that
screen for disease.
"Being able to use this data is almost like a new microscope,"
Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud's chief executive, said.
Mayo and Providence St. Joseph may also share intellectual
property from joint software efforts, tech and health-care
executives said.
Google will open an office for its engineers in Mayo's
Rochester, Minn., headquarters. Moving Mayo data to the cloud --
about three petabytes and growing rapidly -- is expected to be
finished in about three years, executives said.
In the past decade, hospitals rapidly moved patient records to
computers from paper, creating an explosion of data that is costly
to store and cumbersome to use because hospitals rely on multiple
software programs that often don't work together. Now, hospitals
are seeking new ways to collect and organize that data, so it can
be analyzed for new treatments or drug discovery.
Hospital systems have invested heavily in their own data
storage, for greater control over data security, but at a growing
cost for increased capacity and improved cybersecurity, said
health-care analysts.
Some have been reluctant to write off that investment, which has
slowed entry into the cloud, as did security concerns in recent
years, some analysts said.
That is changing as hospitals weigh whether to opt for cloud
storage rather than replace aging data centers, said Gregg Pessin,
a health-care technology analyst at Gartner Inc., a research and
consulting firm. Hospitals can't buy computer equipment as cheaply
as tech giants, which also have more to invest in cybersecurity, he
said.
Nonetheless, security risks remain a concern. Capital One
Financial Corp. in July said the bank suffered a breach of 106
million records from the cloud, after a hacker allegedly took
advantage of a configuration vulnerability.
Cerner will move some corporate systems into Amazon's cloud
along with data from electronic health records and other services,
under its agreement announced in July. It will continue to work
with other technology companies, a spokeswoman said.
Cerner previously worked with Amazon Web Services to develop a
prototype virtual scribe to record information from exam-room
conversations into the medical record. Health-care quality,
operational improvement and waste are all opportunities for machine
learning, said Shez Partovi, director of global business
development for health care, life sciences and genomics for
Amazon's cloud unit.
Amazon, Microsoft and Google are investing to win health-care
cloud business, introducing built-in software to more easily
analyze data for use by doctors and communicate, said Jeffrey
Becker, a senior analyst at research and consulting company
Forrester Research Inc. The companies are competing for the
cloud-computing market, where Amazon is the largest by revenue,
Gartner data show.
As they compete for health-care business, technology companies
are also making inroads into that industry. Amazon acquired online
pharmacy PillPack Inc. and joined Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and
JPMorgan Chase & Co. in a health-care joint venture to better
control employee health-care costs.
That has some hospital systems choosing their technology
contracts carefully. "Microsoft wants to make heath care better,
they don't want to do health care," Rod Hochman, Providence St.
Joseph's chief executive said as the Renton, Wash.-based system
announced its agreement the tech company. "We don't see them as a
competitor that wants to do our business."
Work with Providence St. Joseph will involve research and
development, with pilot projects that will likely change or be
canceled, said Peter Lee, a corporate vice president at Microsoft.
"We are joining at the hip to build technology," he said.
Write to Melanie Evans at Melanie.Evans@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 10, 2019 09:44 ET (13:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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