The COVID-19 pandemic continues to push the healthcare and life sciences industry in entirely new ways. In record time, we’ve witnessed public health officials, vaccine developers, equipment manufacturers, and essential workers take life saving actions—regularly putting their own lives at risk—to respond to the exceptional challenges of our time. 

Yet after all the turmoil and uncertainty of the pandemic, record breaking levels of investment continue to come into the market to fuel innovations. 

Vaccine development is now measured in weeks rather than years; providers are leveraging telehealth technologies to improve the physician and patient experience; and individuals have embraced a variety of devices to assume greater ownership and control of their personal health. 

With that in mind, here are five of the many innovations I see driving healthcare and life sciences for at least the next 12 months: 

1. Unleashing the power of healthcare and life sciences data

People have arguably never had as much access and understanding to their personal health data than they can in 2022. They have the ability to understand their genetic makeup, medical history, family history, and activity levels to ensure they are living a healthy lifestyle. Taken together, this longitudinal profile can become the basis for more personalized medicine. Add wearable devices to the mix and patients gain real- or near-real-time updates on their health status. 

Further, global regulatory agencies have continued to mandate the need for providers to maintain a longitudinal health record that provides a holistic view of the patient across all the encounters they have had with a health system. Physician surveys conducted by the The Harris Poll and Google Cloud show that a 360-degree view of the patient, across all provider encounters, leads to faster, more accurate diagnosis, and better outcomes. 

If secure data access and interoperability can begin to include insurers, researchers, public health officials, and others in the field, the powerful network effects benefiting patients will only grow. When combined with those longitudinal phenome profiles, the opportunities for personalized and preventative medicine enter a whole new era.

2. Healthcare and life sciences M&A boom continues

Although the pandemic initially slowed activity on mergers and acquisitions in the early part of 2020, the healthcare and life sciences industry has seen a rapid rebound and acceleration of deals ever since. The success of COVID-19 vaccines, the importance of telehealth, and the focus on molecular modeling and genomic-based drug development have all boosted investment as organizations look to enter new markets, develop new therapies, and leverage low interest rates while they last. 

In 2021, the total funding of US digital health startups surpassed $29 billion across 729 deals, according to advisory Rock Health. That’s almost double the levels of 2020, which itself set records. Analysts at PWC meanwhile estimate M&A investments in biopharmaceutical and life sciences could approach $400 billion this year across all sub-sectors

Clearly, the pandemic has been a primary driver of investment as the focus on healthcare has dramatically increased. Yet the increased activity also reflects changing business models and emerging technologies that are now required to compete in the rapidly evolving space. For organizations to capitalize on these investments, it will take not only great vision and intellectual property but also the right technologies—like cloud—and the right data interoperability models, to make partnerships and acquisitions more scalable, feasible, and seamless.

3. Transforming the patient experience at a new rate

The pandemic has shined a spotlight on the inefficiencies and complexities that exist in healthcare markets across the globe. As wave after wave has surged, global healthcare systems remain overwhelmed on most every aspect of patients’ treatment journeys. Even before COVID-19, healthcare was already one of the largest spend areas for governments around the world. The pandemic has only exacerbated the known issues. 

Clearly, administrators, regulators, physicians, nurses, and patients would agree that the processes and models need to change. There’s a need to maintain this momentum and even increase the tempo to achieve lasting change.

Take telehealth. Within months of the start of the pandemic, providers moved to provide more remote capabilities so physicians could still meet with patients virtually to ensure health and safety on all sides. Payers recognized the importance of telehealth and began to update reimbursement rules. And organizations are now reimagining policies in areas such as prior authorization, submission, and adjudication to reduce complexity and bureaucracy while improving responsiveness.

Looking beyond the system, organizations are also recognizing and deepening their understanding of the structural and social determinants of health that impact patient care and health outcomes, especially for historically underserved communities.  Private and public sectors are learning from, and increasingly partnering with, the social sciences, public health, biomedical informatics, computer science, public policy and community groups around how to build a mI’ore equitable and inclusive consumer products and Health IT strategies. 

The newfound levels of transparency, visibility, and accountability that patients, caregivers, and organizations are achieving will ultimately increase competition and provide a more effective, equitable, efficient and, above all, healthier marketplace for all patients. As we move past the worst of the pandemic, regulators and organizations should keep fighting for progress over business as usual.

4. AI is now a core competency for Drug Development

The ability of organizations like Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Astrazeneca to develop COVID-19 vaccines has been a remarkable accomplishment—particularly the historic speed with which they were created and deployed. This innovation acceleration was largely enabled by the use of new drug development platforms that allow researchers to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to model protein and cellular interactions to rapidly advance the science.

No longer must researchers rely on traditional laboratory testing (and retesting). With their improved understanding of the molecular and genetic structure of a patient and, for example, their tumor, researchers can use AI to enable simulations on computers rather than testing in live conditions. This technology can process thousands, even millions of simulations to help  identify high-potential candidates for treatment consideration and subsequent analysis. 

AI-enabled drug discovery models can eliminate months and years from the research process, which can reduce the time to develop a drug and accelerate the time to treatment for an individual patient. As just one example, consider the work on AlphaFold2 by Google’s DeepMind unit who leverages AI to predict effective protein shapes for new drugs. Healthcare and life sciences organizations already recognize the potential of AI. Now comes the investments to leverage this rapidly evolving technology to support their efforts now and in the future.   

5. Ecosystem partnerships tackle complexity and spur innovation

As the importance and growth of the healthcare and life sciences industry continues, we will see even more new players and partnerships emerging to address old problems in new ways. This trend will touch all aspects of the healthcare value chain and will, increasingly, see three- and four-player partnerships emerge to address the complex challenges of today’s healthcare marketplace.

Technology will continue to play a key role as capabilities and platforms will transform all aspects of the marketplace. Cell phones, wearable devices, and other technologies will provide real-time updates and notifications to patients on everything from glucose levels to payments for healthcare services. Voice recognition software will document physician and patient discussions to reduce the burden of record keeping. Real-world data will be used to simplify and confidentially recruit patients for participation in clinical trials. 

New players will continue to enter the market to improve health outcomes and reduce costs. Major retailers are among the companies extending their pharmacies to provide additional diagnostic and concierge services, saving patients from additional appointments while boosting prevention. Community organizations are emerging to help identify and care for underserved communities whose health outcomes are significantly lower than the average patient. 

For all the exhausting and heart-wrenching challenges of the past two years, the opportunities the pandemic has laid bare cannot be overlooked. We owe it to those who have worked and fought so hard for every life to forge even more new partnerships—and make it easier to do so—so that the next crisis, when it does arise, will never be as bad as the one we’re now conquering. Technology can be the enabler in this effort and help bring us together to continue to conquer the challenges that lie ahead.

Access to the cloud has advanced the distribution and consumption of financial information on a global scale. In parallel, the global financial data landscape has been transformed by an influx of alternative data sources, including social media, meteorological data, satellite imagery, and other data. Exchanges and market data providers now find they need to include these new datasets to enrich their products and compete, which has meant they now must consider cloud-based models to keep up with the demands of their customers who expect easy, quick, flexible and cost-efficient ways to consume market data.

To address these needs, today we’re announcing the general availability of Datashare for financial services, a new Google Cloud solution that brings together the entire capital markets ecosystem—data publishers, and data consumers—to exchange market data securely and easily.

Datashare helps organize third-party financial information, making it accessible and useful to market data publishers and data consumers. We open-sourced the entire Datashare solution so market data publishers can now onboard their licensed datasets to Google Cloud securely, quickly and easily, while data consumers can consume that data as a service in tools of their preference, such as BigQuery.

Three ways to distribute and consume your data

Batch data delivery

Datashare provides a batch data delivery mechanism for data publishers to deliver their reference data, historical tick data, alternative market data sources and more via BigQuery, reducing the administrative burden on data consumers to extract insights from data. 

Real-time data streaming delivery

By using this event-based data delivery channel for rapidly changing instrument prices, tick data, orders, news and others via Pub/Sub, data consumers can reliably process individual messages or rewind to a point in time to replay a prior market scenario and test model changes.

Monetizing licensed datasets

Market data publishers can onboard their licensed datasets to Google Cloud and make them available via a one-stop-shop on Google Cloud Marketplace, enabling a new sales channel to expand market reach.

Reference architecture

Check out the diagram below to see how you can share your batch and real-time data directly to your Google Cloud customers with BigQuery and Pub/Sub.

As you can see in the above reference architecture, both publishers and consumers can derive several benefits from the solution:

Benefits for data publishers

• You no longer have to maintain your own delivery and licensing infrastructure.
• You can easily package and deliver granular data products and experiments with SQL.
• You can have a solution that scales with your business as data volumes and number of customers grow.

Benefits for data consumers

• Your data is ready for analysis and machine learning (ML)— you no longer have to maintain extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines to load files and transform data.
• You can avoid the expense and burden of maintaining multiple copies of large data files.
• You can be more targeted with consumption of data using BigQuery queries, improving performance, and compliance, and reducing cost.

Accessing the datasets

Google Cloud has been working with multiple industry firms on innovating in the market data space. By using Datashare for publishing, data publishers can make their entire datasets available on Google Cloud. Early adopters of Datashare include firms such as OneTick and Accern. OneTick’s datasets include reference and historical futures data (that can be accessed in our console with your login). Accern’s datasets include alternative data such as market sentiment and credit analysis data (that can be accessed in our console with your login).

To make it more helpful, we partnered with Accern to create a hypothetical scenario to describe the data acquisition and analytics process step-by-step.

Accern use case 

As a sustainability analyst, you require an economic, social and governance (ESG) dataset to determine which sector is the most widely covered ESG sector by analysts, and to also identify the sector with the lowest ESG sentiment score. Now, you can discover and acquire an ESG dataset in Google Cloud.

Step 1. Navigate to the Financial Services solutions page in the Google Cloud console:

Step 2. Click a dataset, for example Accern AI-Generated ESG Insights, then review the overview details, plans and pricing, documentation and support information. To view the available pricing tiers, click ‘View All Plans’. Once you’ve decided on a tier that you would like to subscribe to, click ‘Select’, choose a billing account and review and accept the terms of service to complete the subscription. Once the steps are complete, click ‘Subscribe’ at the bottom. An overlay window will appear, click ‘Register with Accern’ to activate and complete the subscription.

Step 3. Once activation is complete, you’ll be directed to the Datashare ‘My Products’ screen. Voila! You are now subscribed to Accern’s ESG Scores dataset and can access it in your Google Cloud instance using BigQuery. To access the data, click the hour glass icon on the corresponding ‘My Products’ record that you just purchased. An overlay will present you with the details on the dataset and/or table. Click the ‘Navigate to Table’ button to navigate through to the BigQuery console.

Step 4. Now that you have access and are in the BigQuery console, it’s time to generate data insights.

^{For this example, we’ve eliminated the company identifying information that is included as part of the subscription and aggregated company ESG in a view where each row represents a day, an industry sector, a specific identified ‘ESG Issues’ (event_group and event) and the respective ‘ESG Sentiment’ per issue.}

For example, row 1 indicates that within the ‘Healthcare’ sector, there was a ‘Social – Civil Society’ issue identified and it had a negative ESG sentiment score of -15.35.

Step 5. Generate a report by exporting it to Data Studio to build visualizations and conduct additional analysis on the ESG data.

Select ‘Export’ and ‘Explore with Data Studio’.

Step 6. Build a simple/basic report.

Now that the ESG data appears in Data Studio, you can start by building a simple chart to help you understand which industry sectors have the highest volume of discussions around ESG and the overall ESG Sentiment per industry sector.

To build the chart:

• Select the chart type ‘Table’.

• Include Entity_Sector as your dimension to aggregate results by ‘Industry Sector.’
• Include Signal_ID as a measure to count the number of ESG passages identified per ‘Industry Sector.’
• Include AVG(Event_Sentiment) as a measure to display the overall ESG Sentiment per ‘Industry Sector’ across ESG Issues.

You can see sectors that are  most discussed when it comes to ESG related topics and their corresponding ‘ESG Sentiment’ scores.

Step 7. Build your final report in Data Studio.

As a next step you can further drill into the data to understand ESG data specific to each ‘Industry Sector’ and identify positive and negative ESG practices. 

Accern has built a more complex sample dashboard and made it available publicly here. You can interact with this report and play around with the data. The dashboard can help to identify material ESG insights for each sector to inform your investment and risk processes. If you have additional questions, you can reach out to Accern directly.

Discovering, accessing and analyzing licensed datasets is quick and easy. Stay tuned for more updates on new licensed datasets.

Publishing your data via Datashare

If you are a publisher of market data, alternative, or exotic data, you can use Datashare to get it published on Google Cloud Marketplace.

Start by joining the Partner Advantage program by registering for the Partner Advantage Portal and applying for the Partner Advantage Build Model engagement. Visit our getting started guide for information to get started on publishing licensed datasets in the Marketplace. Stay tuned for a future blog post about using Datashare to publish datasets in the Marketplace.

More solutions for capital markets

Check out other Google Cloud solutions for capital markets.

As the volume and velocity of data grows daily, business success depends on the ability to manage it effectively and transform it into actionable insights. Since 2019, Google Cloud and MongoDB have worked together to give businesses the secure, global, and highly performant infrastructure, the sophisticated data intelligence, and the developer-centric tools they need to power modern, data-driven cloud applications. Our partnership with MongoDB continues to deliver richer yet simpler ways to lead with software.

With MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud, developers can build upon a solid foundation that enables them to work with data the way they want in support of global-scale applications. For example, Forbes, a large business media brand, migrated its platform to Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas in just six months. The company’s new cloud infrastructure helped the website scale to accommodate record-breaking growth even while making development more nimble. MongoDB’s document model meant developers could build new features quickly, easily incorporate changes, and better handle a growing diversity of data types. It also allowed for more powerful tools, such a machine-language trending story recommendation engine for journalists. Results have been impressive, including:

• 58% faster build time for new products and fixes
• Accelerated release cycle by 4x
• Reduced total cost of ownership by 25%
• 28% increase in subscriptions from new newsletters

The Forbes team is already looking ahead, with plans for improved personalization, loyalty, and management of first-party data. “Our decision to migrate to Google Cloud was made based on the toolset that it offers, scalability, and developer friendliness,” says Vadim Supitsky, Forbes CTO.

Over the course of the partnership between MongoDB and Google Cloud, we have continually added new benefits for our mutual customers, such as the ability to to integrate MongoDB Atlas with Google Cloud products; leveraging BigQuery to create a managed, serverless, scalable architecture; rich data connectivity; and flexible scaling. We’ve also made it easier to migrate MongoDB on-premises instances to MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud.

Making MongoDB on Google Cloud even more flexible with Pay-Go

That’s why we’re excited to see yet another reason for companies to choose MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud: A new pay-as-you-go option, available on the Google Cloud Marketplace. With this new offering, developers now have a simplified subscription experience, and enterprises have a simplified way to procure MongoDB in addition to privately negotiated offers already supported on the Google Cloud Marketplace. There are no up-front commitments required to use MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud, and customers pay only for the resources they use and scale based on their needs. Here are just a few of the benefits of this new service:

• Spin up a MongoDB Atlas cluster on the Google Cloud Console within a few minutes
• No need for a separate credit card payment: You can use your Google Cloud Billing account for your MongoDB Atlas environment
• Receive a single bill for Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas
• Apply Google Cloud committed spend to MongoDB transactions through Google Cloud Marketplace
• Get started with MongoDB Atlas with 512 MB of storage for free. Atlas free tier clusters are perfect for learning MongoDB or prototyping applications

We’re excited to see even further growth in our continuing partnership with three new developments: First, because resellers are such an important force, we are pleased to share that reseller partners can now make MongoDB Atlas available via the Google Cloud Marketplace. Second, MongoDB and Google Cloud have expanded our joint reach to 28 global regions after adding Toronto, Canada, and Santiago, Chile. And third, we’ve made a joint commitment to early stage companies through MongoDB for Startups and the Google for Startups Cloud Program. Pay-Go is great for startups because it’s easy to scale and you only pay for what you use. Similarly, MongoDB and Google are helping startups get off the ground with our respective programs, which both include credits and support.

Better together

Your company’s transformation hinges on new cloud database capabilities. The first step to building all-new digital experiences is to select the operational database that will power your application and, in essence, run your business.The partnership between MongoDB and Google Cloud gives you the benefits of a modern database service in a tightly integrated, cloud-native way. Since the beginning of our collaborative journey, we have made significant enhancements to the experience for our mutual customers, and we continue to work toward providing a rich developer experience for MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud.

Discover how customers choose MongoDB and Google Cloud to power the future of customer innovation. For more information on how to get started, visit MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud Marketplace.