This week the “Big Tech” in the US Congress has been questioned, since these companies have monopoly power in the digital economy sector, and this is an expanding sector. In fact, these companies that Listed on Wall Street they presented solid results, despite the COVID-19 crisis with figures that exceed the estimates made by analysts. This demonstrates an unprecedented change to a growth in the “digital”, all promoted by a situation in which measures such as confinement and ensuring social distance have allowed for further expansion.
Furthermore, this current epidemic situation has shown the vulnerability of human beings to a virus, putting the health sector and innovation as priority areas before governments.
But these “Big Tech” have already been anticipated, seeing digital health as a promising future, since health spending worldwide represents 10% of GDP according to the WHO, and together with the inefficiency of the management of some health systems, which have been affected during the pandemic. It can represent an opportunity to develop disruptive technology worldwide and create Digital Health companies, which is why they are currently betting on investment funds, launch programs and co-projects with health startups and companies in the health sector.
One of the strategies taken is Corporate Venturing, which is a hybrid innovation model, which is based on the Open Innovation to seek innovation and new talent, through synergy between these large companies and startups. Among the tools that use these strategies are Hackantos, which increased during the acute pandemic process, being one of the most powerful #EUvsVirus that was looking for innovative solutions to combat COVID-19 in a pan-European strategy.
Therefore, the development of digital health is expanding, and in a construction process accelerated by the current situation, in which the main categories for which the “Big Tech” bets are: Big Data, genomics, administrative tools, clinical research and diagnostics.
These areas are also priorities in the Master’s Degree in Digital Health Innovation at the Complutense University, and the different categories will be addressed so that the health professional through use cases can develop their creativity and present technological solutions, which perhaps in the future can be part of initiatives for these Big Techs such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon or Tencent.
In case you are interested, I leave you a couple of project links that these large corporations are developing, such as SWORD Health, or Livongo Health.