Should Apple Join the Amazon/Berkshire/JPMorgan Joint Healthcare Venture?
Apple should get involved with the Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase & Co joint healthcare venture that the companies announced last year, said Jim Cramer, television personality and former hedge fund manager.
According to a CNBC report this week, Cramer—the host of CNBC's Mad Money and whose charitable trust also owns shares of Apple—said that J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon would have to be the one to bring Apple involved in the venture, since Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway owns a huge stake in the tech stock that could appear "self-serving.” Said Cramer, “It is really time for, I think, that ecosystem to embrace the Apple ecosystem."
As Healthcare Informatics noted in a news report published last January, “With an ambitious-sounding, if vaguely worded, announcement, three corporate giants—Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced Jan. 30 that they were launching an initiative to improve satisfaction and reduce costs for their companies’ employees...The three companies, which bring their scale and complementary expertise to this long-term effort, will pursue this objective through an independent company that is free from profit-making incentives and constraints. The initial focus of the new company will be on technology solutions that will provide U.S. employees and their families with simplified, high-quality and transparent healthcare at a reasonable cost.’”
Although not many details are known about this collaboration, the organizations named Atul Gawande, M.D., as CEO of the initiative, back in June.
Meanwhile, in August, Amazon said it would be part of another endeavor related to healthcare—to remove interoperability barriers and to make progress on adoption of health data standards. For this initiative, Amazon will be teaming up with Microsoft, Google, IBM, and others to jointly commit to support healthcare interoperability by advancing healthcare standards such as HL7 (Health Level Seven International), FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), and the Argonaut Project.
Over the past year, industry observers have had their eye on non-traditional healthcare players such as Amazon and what they can bring to the table from an innovation and cost-cutting perspective. One recent survey of 100 healthcare organization leaders found that most C-suite executives do have their eyes on Amazon to shake up healthcare.
Apple, of course, also had a big announcement in early 2018: that it would be testing its new Health Records feature out with 12 hospitals, inclusive of some of the most prominent healthcare institutions in the U.S. Since that time, more than 100 new organizations have joined the project, according to Apple. The idea behind the feature is that consumers could see their medical records right on their iPhones.
In a recent interview with Cramer that aired this week, Apple CEO Tim Cook attested, “I believe, if you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the question, 'What was Apple's greatest contribution to mankind?' It will be about health.”
