One of the mantras in Silicon Valley is 'don't be afraid of failure,' and companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google have brought that approach to healthcare. Retail giants like Walmart and Walgreens have also had their share of failures.
One prime example is Haven, the collaboration between JPMorgan Chase, Amazon and Berkshire-Hathaway. The venture launched with much hype, but since then has been relatively quiet while building its team.
"The tech giants are not going to replace healthcare in the way we deliver healthcare when patients are really sick, at least from what I can see," Sameer Badlani, CIO of Fairview, told Becker's last year. "We are the organizations that people trust with their lives. Amazon isn't going to open a hospital; Google won't open a birthing center. But they both are looking for discrete opportunities to get into the healthcare cycle where their competitiveness based on analytics, technology and mindset can disrupt and provide them additional revenue."
Many have made big bets on healthcare, and experienced big failures in the past several years while trying to disrupt an extremely complex industry. Here are some of the high-profile failures in the past decade:
1. Microsoft HealthVault, launched to initially store medical records, was shuttered in 2019. The industry is still trying to figure out how to make patient ownership of medical records and interoperability a reality. Last year, Allscripts made its patient engagement platform FollowMy Health available to Microsoft HealthVault users to transition their information before the service was shut down.
2. Google Health was launched to help patients gather healthcare information, but was shut down a few years later in 2012. The company said that its Google Health service wasn't able to reach widespread adoption at the time.
3. Apple Watch has had admirable goals of improving health and preventing medical issues, but remains largely a tool for those who are already inclined toward fitness to measure their progress. There has been some progress on the healthcare side, including its partnership with Zimmer Biomet targeted for patients recovering from joint replacement procedures, and the electrocardiogram app and sensor designed to help detect early stage atrial fibrillation, but could also have false positives.
4. Walgreens aimed to streamline healthcare delivery by opening around 400 walk-in clinics at stores across the country. However, in October 2019 the company reported it would close around 160 clinics that it runs by itself, saying the clinics barely broke even. The retail giant kept open 220 clinics at its stores run by local health systems.
5. Theranos began as a Silicon Valley biotech startup with a great story: a Stanford University dropout Elizabeth Holmes founded the company and claimed to offer hundreds of tests with a few drops of blood through its proprietary technology. However, it was discovered that the technology was inaccurate and most of the tests were put through machinery from Siemens. The company dissolved after a Wall Street Journal expose was published about its technology, and Ms. Holmes' wealth went from $4.5 billion to $0. She will face trial, along with former Theranos COO Ramesh Balwani, in July for wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
6. IBM launched Watson Health five years ago with the goal of revolutionizing healthcare with artificial intelligence. However, the technology rollout did not go as planned. The company reported heavy layoffs three years later and provider feedback showed Watson for Oncology had inadequate outcomes. The company also stopped developing and selling the Watson for Drug Discovery product in 2019.
Despite these failures, many of these technology companies continue to stretch their reach into other areas of healthcare to disrupt the supply chain, revenue cycle and data management. In many cases, those initiatives are in partnership with hospitals and health systems.
"In the end, it's up to us to reimagine and reinvent our value proposition for our patients," said Dr. Badlani. "Dual disruption, as it's called."