[ad_1]
Last year, at the HIMSS conference on healthcare, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt pointed out that health care was still at "the age of stone "and depended on fax machines and pagers.
A Google Cloud spokesperson described the fax demonstration as a "prototype of the possibilities offered by APIs and an open cloud platform." In other words, although the product is not yet available, it indicates what will come from Google.
Google is competing with Microsoft and Amazon to bring its cloud service into the healthcare industry. One approach has been to stand out by providing advanced technology, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, that can be used to badyze health data.
None of this is possible if health data is not widely available. And these days, it's still common for medical information to be shared by fax rather than in a computer-readable format.
There are several reasons for this. For starters, there is tradition. Some older doctors are comfortable with these technologies and do not want to let them go. Under current federal privacy laws, faxes are also considered safe and secure to allow physicians to send medical records.
"Every hospital, no matter how big, has a fax machine, so it's the safest and easiest way to get the information you need," said Nate Gross, doctor and co-founder of Doximity, a start-up created with a product called DocFax that allows doctors to send faxes without a physical fax, told CNBC.
As a result, health care is the only sector still relying on such outdated technology. (CNBC had previously reported the trend of millennial medical students not knowing what to do when asked to send a fax for the first time.)
Google seems to recognize that it has to meet the health sector clients where they are.
And they are at the old fax machine.
WATCH: CFO Alphabet: Intensely Focused on Delivery to Users
[ad_2]
Source link
