The AI Doctor Orders More Tests

Google and its rivals are pushing into machine-learning diagnoses.

1496868597_kurt1-CMS — Illustration by Kurt Woerpel

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By Mark Bergen

June 8, 2017 at 10:00 AM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

This article is part of the June 12, 2017 issue of businessweek.

Few U.S. industries are growing as fast as health care, but the big public-cloud companies—Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google—have struggled to crack the $3.2 trillion market. Even as hospitals and insurers collect mountains of health data on individual Americans, most of their spending on extra data storage is for old-school systems on their own premises, according to researcher IDC.

The public-cloud kingpins are trying to lure health-care providers with artificially intelligent cloud services that can act like doctors. The companies are testing, and in some cases marketing, AI software that automates mundane tasks including data entry; consulting work like patient management and referrals; and even the diagnostic elements of highly skilled fields such as pathology.