Telehealth surges – possibly reshaping care delivery
Just how much has COVID boosted the telemedicine industry? The incumbent players in the space include Teladoc, MDLIVE and American Well, as well as international companies including Britain’s Babylon, Sweden’s Kry and France’s Doctolib. Babylon signed on 140,000 new users in the UK since the onset of COVID. Companies have been providing telehealth for more than half a dozen years, but the healthcare industry has been slow to embrace remote care. CNBC
dis-rup-shun: Healthcare providers in the U.S. have been on a building tear, throwing neighborhood clinics into many neighborhoods, creating, in many places, a glut of walk-in clinics. For this reason, along with resistance to change, telecare has not been attractive to providers. Consumers, however, have experience the convenience of remote care, and will likely, for many years, hold on to a fear of being in places with sick people. Expect care providers to embrace telehealth and blend remote services into traditional offerings.
Britian’s NHS creates its own national contact tracking app, shunning Google and Apple collaboration
Britain’s National Health Service has developed a Bluetooth-based contact tracking app which stores contact data between all users of the app in a database. If individuals choose to self-identify as infected, the app can notify all of those people who were in contact with the infected person. The NHS app stores data on a central server, whereas the Google Apple contact tracking app stores info on smartphones in a decentralized architecture. CNBC
dis-rup-shun: So, to whom do you wish to provide your location data: Big Tech, federal government, or no one? In the spirit of helping our communities track and address pandemics, do we offer data and participate, or, as CNBC states, is mission creep too tempting by any party? Big Tech already has the majority of our personal data if we own a smartphone, so perhaps trusting BigTech to use the data not only for profit but also for good is enough. Separation of tech and state will have to remain strong for all but those who wish to entrust all personal info to their governments.
Tom Cruise and Elon Musk collaborate on movie filmed in space
Cruise and Musk are apparently partnering on a project to film a movie, or some of a movie, aboard one of Musk’s SpaceX crafts. No details were offered on schedule, plot or names. CNET
dis-rup-shun: Musk has often been guilty of blurring the lines between space business and show business, and Cruise has often been guilty of considering himself out of this world, so the collaboration may be a match made in heaven. Before launching Hollywood into outer space, SpaceX must successfully send a NASA astronaut to the International Space Station on May 27th. If that goes well, perhaps movie talk is in order.
A rare event — Apple products on sale
A number of hot products from Apple, including the generation 5 watch, iPad, iPod and AirPods are among the items being cleared from Best Buy stock — an event that rarely occurs. Wired
dis-rup-shun: Strange times make for strange sales, and Best Buy, despite having a steady online business, is suffering mightily, like most all other retailers, from stores shuttered for nearly two months. Expect quite a few surprising sales as companies across the globe from Neiman Marcus to Best Buy fight for survival and liquidate inventory.