Is tech’s role in healthcare a first step towards an idyllic Kurzweilian partnership between humans and machines or the beginning of an Orwellian nightmare?

As more tech companies become involved in making the American health care system more efficient, the monolith as it has existed for decades will finally be disassembled.

There are many reasons to get excited about this disruption. These new players are masters of efficiency who have looked at the costs involved with health care and understand that they can do better — much better. As Bruce Jaspen wrote in a recent Forbes article put it: “If Amazon and Buffet lift the veil on health prices, insurers are in trouble.”

Indeed.

However, the way they achieve these efficiencies in their warehouses and sales floors gives us a clue about how they might achieve the same effect in health care. It might just be what the doctor ordered, so to speak. Or, as American author and futurist Amy Webb predicted in her #SWX18 Tech Trends keynote, policymakers may fail to appropriately deal with the new privacy and security challenges these technologies will present, landing us in a sort of big-brother-like dystopia. In this first of two articles on the topic, I’ll explore the latter outcome.

An Introduction To The Players

Numerous shakeups in the healthcare industry have taken place in the last few months. First, CVS and Aetna announced a merger that, as Reed Abelson and Katie Thomas reported for The New York Times reported, is intended to “create a world where … getting high-quality, low-cost medical care will be as close as your corner drugstore,” which they hope to accomplish by putting their “merged data about people’s health and vast reach” to work for them. What this would look like in a nutshell is that diagnoses would increasingly be made by artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and web portals. Anything non-acute would be handled by a local health care provider, such as a clinic or community pharmacy.

Then, Amazon announced its intentions to form its own health care company with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan. The details have not yet been disclosed, but we know that this company will focus on “technology solutions.” We need only to look at the technology solutions they are employing elsewhere to get an idea of their vision.

Last but not least, Apple entered the fray, announcing that it will open private medical clinics in order to offer its employees the best healthcare experience in the world. According to Christina Farr at CNBC, Apple is also looking to hire “doctors, health coaches and ‘health designers’ to create a program to promote healthy behavior.”