In 2020 the big technology companies, committed to Digital Health in response to the pandemic by COVID-19 through digital tools for tracking contacts, or through platforms for data management and research.
The COVID-19 outbreak and its characterization by the World Health Organization as a pandemic in the first half of March 2020, forced governments to respond quickly to mass infections. Similarly, technology companies played an important role in creating digital health technologies for infection control and research.
At the beginning of the first mobility restrictions in the United States, Apple launched an update of Siri, its Artificial Intelligence system, with information and conversations about COVID-19. The system could record symptoms and possible exposures, and also recommended telehealth applications.
The system could record symptoms and possible exposures, and recommended telehealth applications. Later, it improved the symptom checker through a tool developed in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In addition, it enabled a website for verified COVID-19 test provider laboratories to record their location to appear in their mapping application update.
However, one of the most relevant actions of 2020 in Digital Health, was the collaboration within Apple and Google. Both companies jointly developed a COVID-19 contact tracking tool based on interoperable systems. By May, the system was working normally and the exposure notification system was used in several countries of the European Union and in Latin America only in Uruguay.
On the other hand, Alphabet Inc, Google's parent company, developed different innovations based on artificial intelligence, data flow and clinical research through its different subsidiaries such as DeepMind and Google Cloud.
In April Google launched a web platform for community mobility reports, which through anonymous information of locations generated information about the behavior of the population in mobility trends. Later, after the collaboration with Apple, the Google Cloud Healthcare API was launched, a platform to standardize data sharing between cloud-based tools.
By December, in one of the last actions of the year, Google announced a Google Health application, for the recruitment of participants in medical research. The first available research was conducted by Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Finally, in November Amazon launched a primary health care system based on digital technologies. Amazon Health Lake is a tool that enables health agencies to query and categorize data through automatic learning of information hosted in the cloud, as well as to standardize information in HL7 FHIR.
