Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Do you have a sense of the state of the union of all that? It seems like Apple is taking a decisive position on trying to play a big role in the quantified self movement. What is your assessment? What’s happening? Who’s doing what? A small startup can’t take Apple on given where they are situated in the ecosystem right now.

William King: I would argue in reverse. A fledgling company has a distinct advantage over Apple. Apple is a well-known company with well-known products and has had great success with those products. They’re a data enabler. Can they help to push the quantified self? Of course. Will they use that in their marketing? Absolutely. Look at Watson in IBM. They talk about predictive and all of the things that Watson can solve. Apple has a long history of playing nice and not playing nice with other people’s datasets.

Sramana Mitra: They’re not the greatest partners in the industry.

William King: A smaller company can be totally agnostic. Quantified self isn’t just my health data. Quantified self is everything. It’s anything I can get my hands on. Apple is a great example of where my phone knows when I’m walking or when I’m in the car. It knows where I’m likely to be driving. You can cross that over with FitBit data. Of course, I can use my Apple Watch. FitBit data might give me a slightly different set of data parameters.

We can take browser activity like Facebook data. Think about some of the imaging data. If you bring that home, they give it to you on a CD. What am I going to do with that? A smaller company that’s thinking about the problem in a data agnostic way and thinking about the consumer experience would give a distinct advantage.

Sramana Mitra: So you’re saying just take the data and figure out ways to connect that with other data sources and package up solutions?

William King: Yes. The point is, it doesn’t have to just be the Apple’s of the world. Think about what Amazon offers. You’ve ordered this in the past. You might consider something similar. Those are the kinds of things that could be applied to quantified self. It doesn’t really matter if it’s Apple or Amazon data.

The point you’re making is the right point. It’s the bigger ecosystem and how all of these players can be input. At the end of the day if this is done very well, two things should happen. I should understand, as the patient, who I am better. It should be able to connect me with better care.

Two, I should be thinking about what is that data worth? Where is it stored? Do I want to monetize it? Where does it live in that ecosystem? It’s a big advantage for these big companies. Privacy is in the news.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health
1 2 3 4 5 6 7