How technology is designing the future of health care UNDERWRITTEN BY TABLE OF CONTENTS 01 Former Google CEO Schmidt says 17 The Future of Life Sciences and AI ‘will have its biggest impact’ in Healthcare — Transform Patient health care Experience with Adapting Digital Technology like Hybrid Cloud and AI 04 ‘More Amazon and less pharmacy’: one exec on the company’s strategy for prescription drugs 21 How digital pharmacies can expand access to specialized care 07 Measuring blood sugar in real time is a game changer for patients — 23 There’s a gold rush in health tech. and a health tech success story Here’s how the smart money stays ahead 10 How Cityblock Health is tapping into technology to better care for 25 Illumina CEO insists GRAIL merger Medicaid patients will be good for competition, and ultimately, patients 14 From big tech to small tech: A health care visionary pushes for 28 Amazon, Salesforce execs weigh in a patient-centric approach to on how tech can help with Covid — technology and how it can’t HOW TECHNOLOGY IS DESIGNING THE FUTURE OF HEALTH CARE TABLE OF CONTENTS In medical parlance, “stat” means important and urgent, and that’s what we’re all about — quickly and smartly delivering good stories. We take you inside science labs and hospitals, biotech boardrooms, and political backrooms. We dissect crucial discoveries. We examine controversies and puncture hype. We hold individuals and institutions accountable. We introduce you to the power brokers and personalities who are driving a revolution in human health. These are the stories that matter to us all. BOSTON • WASHINGTON • NEW YORK SAN FRANCISCO • LOS ANGELES • CLEVELAND Our team includes talented writers, editors, and producers capable of the kind of explanatory journalism that complicated science issues some- times demand. And even if you don’t work in science, have never stepped foot in a hospital, or hated high school biology, we’ve got something for you. The world of health, science, and medicine is booming and yielding fascinating stories. We explore how they affect us all. And, with our eBook series, we regularly do deep dives into timely topics to get you the inside scoop you need. HOW TECHNOLOGY IS DESIGNING THE FUTURE OF HEALTH CARE INTRODUCTION How technology is designing the future of health care The Covid-19 pandemic has ushered in a new era of medicine. More care than ever before is being delivered virtually. Consumers can add medical tests and prescriptions to an online cart and have them speedily delivered directly to their homes. New technologies can monitor cases of infection in a city and warn of a coming surge. All the while, tools that were being deployed before the pandemic have continued to advance at a rapid clip. Researchers are turning to artificial intelligence to do everything from catch breast cancer to predict which hospitalized patients will deteriorate. The cloud is continuing to transform how health care data is stored, shared, and mined for insights. Technologies like continuous glucose monitoring are changing the way that a growing number of people manage their diseases. All face hurdles and pressing questions as they are adopted more broadly. Those advances were front and center at the STAT Health Tech Summit, where experts working at the intersection of tech and health care came together onstage to discuss how they’re designing the future of health. These stories illustrate the breadth of those conversations, and the depth of work happening as Silicon Valley giants and upstarts alike try to make their mark in health tech. HOW TECHNOLOGY IS DESIGNING THE FUTURE OF HEALTH CARE LETTER FROM OUR EDITOR Former Google CEO Schmidt says AI ‘will have its biggest HEALTH TECH HEALTH impact’ in health care By Andrew Joseph | MAY 11, 2021 For the myriad applications of artificial intelligence, Eric Schmidt, the onetime Google CEO, sees one area where it’s poised to unleash the most sweeping changes. “When I try to market the importance of AI, I say that AI will have its biggest impact in biology and health, because biology is so complicated,” Schmidt said Tuesday at STAT’s Health Tech Summit. But to fully unlock AI’s full potential, there need to be policy changes, Schmidt said in a conversation with Linda Henry, the CEO of Boston Globe Media Partners, STAT’s parent company. For example, people generally have to agree to let their anonymized health data be used for research purposes, but that limits how much information is available for algorithms to glean insights from — and in turn how much can be learned about human health, Schmidt argued. “I’d like the privacy rules to be changed so it’s opt-out for research,” said Schmidt, the co-founder of Schmidt Futures who in June will take over as board chair of the genetics powerhouse the Broad Institute. HOW TECHNOLOGY IS DESIGNING THE FUTURE OF HEALTH CARE ARTICLE 1 | 01 Schmidt continued: “All the big health care systems have a great deal of information about their patients, and those, properly, are controlled by HIPAA and lawyers and so forth and so on, so if you want to do research, you can do research with 50 people or 100 people, but it’s very hard to get a large, population-wide study that’s big enough for these algorithms to really play off.” He made it clear he does not feel the data privacy rules should be changed for commercial or other uses. Only with AI and machine learning can scientists tackle the massive data quandaries that biology poses, Schmidt argued. He highlighted, for example, a project Broad scientists are involved with that aims to understand how cells communicate with each other, “so we can discover the language of life.” “The only way to do that is to take a large amount of experiments and then use AI to look for patterns that are not apparent to you and me,” Schmidt said. “Because people have already looked at them — they haven’t seen them — but the computer can see them.” Schmidt also paid tribute to Eli Broad, the philanthropist and founder of the Broad Institute, who died April 30. He said Broad deserved “a fair amount of credit” for helping build the scientific and biotech hub of Kendall Square by establishing and endowing a research center that brought together the area’s top scientists. “Eli Broad took a pile of money and put it on top of a building,” was how Schmidt said he simplistically described Broad’s contribution. But in doing so, he created an opportunity for faculty from Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and affiliated hospitals “to compete for labs and money and so forth because they could build an interdisciplinary solution inside the Broad.” HOW TECHNOLOGY IS DESIGNING THE FUTURE OF HEALTH CARE ARTICLE 1 | 02 During the conversation, Henry also raised Schmidt’s unforeseen role in the formation of STAT. In 2014, Henry’s husband, John Henry, attended a dinner hosted by Schmidt where attendees discussed why Boston was losing out to Silicon Valley as the country’s preeminent tech center. Henry then realized that Boston’s dominant role in the life sciences was a story that was not, as he later wrote, “being covered by a serious, standalone news organization committed to the kind of in-depth journalism that has been a hallmark of The Boston Globe,” which Henry had purchased about a year before Schmidt’s dinner. That dinner, Linda Henry told Schmidt on Tuesday, served as the inspiration for STAT’s founding. “You guys did the work,” Schmidt replied. “Thank you for the credit.” HOW TECHNOLOGY IS DESIGNING THE FUTURE OF HEALTH CARE ARTICLE 1 | 03 ‘More Amazon and less pharmacy’: one exec on the company’s strategy HEALTH TECH HEALTH for prescription drugs By Kate Sheridan | MAY 12, 2021 Amazon’s objectives for its nascent pharmacy business are straightforward: “better selection, better convenience, and better prices,” according to TJ Parker, the vice president of pharmacy at the company. “It really is the Amazon playbook,” he said during a Wednesday panel at STAT’s Health Tech Summit. Parker joined Amazon from PillPack after the logistics and online shopping giant bought the company in 2018; Parker was PillPack’s co-founder and CEO. Then a small, New Hampshire-based outfit, PillPack was known for pre- packaging pills into pouches, hoping to make it easier for people to keep track of their medications. At the time, experts saw the $743 million acquisition as a potentially disruptive move from Amazon into the highly regulated world of prescription drugs. But in the years since, PillPack’s team — now Amazon’s pharmacy division — went silent and largely flew under the radar. Over the last few months, that has changed. HOW TECHNOLOGY IS DESIGNING THE FUTURE OF HEALTH CARE ARTICLE 2 | 04 In November, Amazon formally unveiled its new division. And on Wednesday, Parker detailed the division’s strategy in his first public speaking engagement in more than 2 1/2 years. “Customers really want more Amazon and less pharmacy and so our work from here is to make pharmacy truly as seamless to us as amazon.com [is] for other categories,” Parker said. Among Amazon’s latest offerings: a new price-comparison tool for medications, which launched Tuesday. Now, when someone searches for a prescription drug on Amazon, Amazon Pharmacy’s price for a drug is listed alongside the cost for Prime members at other pharmacies like CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, and Costco. (When STAT searched for several different popular medications with the tool’s default settings, Amazon Pharmacy was always the top choice — even when it wasn’t the lowest price — although sorting results by price is also offered.) Allowing people to compare the prices of drugs before they commit to a pharmacy is a novel idea, Parker said.