The Race to Dominate Digital Health Heats Up

The battle to own digital health will escalate with Google expected to introduce a new service to collect data from fitness trackers and apps. The tech giant’s addition to its mobile operating system, likely to be described in greater detail at the I/O conference in San Francisco, follows Apple’s unveiling of HealthKit, Samsung’s SAMI announcement and WebMD’s launch of Healthy Target. Each is a play to become the consumer platform for health, a one-stop hub for a person’s own biometric data as well as personalized insights and health content.

It’s the latest in a long line of fierce wars for the mobile customer, which have ranged across phone specs, developer loyalty, navigation services, music, media and more.

Health offers the next opening to differentiate operating systems, the next opportunity to tie consumers into ecosystems and the next source of information that can be tapped for consumer insights. To succeed, companies will have to figure out how to deliver something of real, perceivable value (which would seem like an obvious statement but for the litany of copycat devices cluttering the market today).

Better monitoring sensors should lead to more useful health data. For one, a real-time feed of medical data into clinics and hospitals means doctors can be alerted and respond in the event of alarming divergences. Devices that can collect increasingly reliable data at home, including glucose levels, could also be a significant boost for telemedicine, saving people the cost and hassle of going into the physician’s office.

Now throw in genomic data, thanks to plummeting prices of DNA sequencing.

The even bigger promise here is that collecting increasingly complete medical profiles from millions and millions of people, healthy and sick and somewhere in between, will offer fresh insights into the causes and cures for devastating diseases. Everyone will effectively be enrolled in a medical study on a length and scale that we’ve never seen.