U.S. INVESTING BILLIONS INTO DIGITAL HEALTH, BUT STILL GETTING SICKER AND DYING YOUNGER Silicon Valley, Boston and elsewhere has spent years prom- ising to make North Americans healthy again and venture investors have invested billions and billions of dollars into the sector, funding start-ups that aim to bring down the costs of care while improving quality and access to the right providers. Innovation in the $3.5 trillion-dollar health- care industry is at an all time high with some of the amazing products coming out of these investments that include virtual care solutions, wearables, medication management apps and new tools that allow physicians to engage with their patients between visits. That all sounds great. And software is supposed to improve every industry. But when it comes to the health-care industry, it seems that it is not making us healthier and in fact might have the opposite effect as recent reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that life expec- tancy is dropping for the first time in decades. Suicide, alcoholism, smoking and the opioid epidemic all being to blame for the increase. Added to this, millennials are on pace to be part of the most obese generation in history which does not help when it comes to health statistics. However, these health-care technologies are still new, and many of the digital health companies are going after young and relatively healthy people who are looking for premium care or who want to track their workouts and daily activity. Added to this that most of the funding for digital health has come in the last five to seven years and data cycles in health care are particularly slow, so maybe the benefits of these new tools won’t be realized for a long time and they may be helping people, but we’re just not detecting it with the recent data.
BELL IS LOOKING FOR YOUR DATA
Bell Canada’s largest telecommunications group is following the lead of companies like Google and Facebook in collect- ing massive amounts of data about the activities and preferences of its customers.
The telecommunications giant began asking its customers in December for permission to track everything they do with their home and mobile phones, internet, television, apps or any other services they get through Bell or its affiliates. In return, the company says it will provide advertising and promotions that are more “tailored” to the customers needs and preferences. What does “tailored” mean? Well it means that the company would be able to customize advertising based on users account information and service usage patterns, similar to the ways that companies like Google and social medial plat- forms do currently to increase ads views to potential customer for its advertisers.
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • JANUARY 2019
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