Welcome to the first weekend bonus episode of the Tech Mem Right Home for

2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Christina Farr is the one reporter I follow religiously to keep up on the health tech

space. Christina was one of our first ever weekend bonus episode, Guess, almost exactly

a year ago, so I thought we'd check in a year later to find out how things are going in health tech.

Why are all the big tech companies so obsessed with health data all of the sudden?

Why are you more likely to have your health record hacked

than ever actually get your health records in your hands?

What is the legality around hospitals selling your health data? All of this and more.

Christina, thanks for coming to talk to us again.

Yeah, thanks for having me. So when we spoke a year ago, we talked a lot about things like

wearables and AI in health tech and I kind of hate to start off with one of those one of these sort of like

broad questions right off the bat but did those a lot of those trends bear out over the

course of the year because I kind of stopped hearing about it a lot. Like what were the what were some of the biggest stories

that we saw in Hell Tech over the last year,

the things that you found yourself writing about over and over again?

Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question and you know an important time to kind of look back as we get into a new decade, crazy.

So, you know, it's funny, I think at the beginning of of the year a lot of folks were talking about the AI and machine learning and kind of bringing these tools to bear in health.

But one of the things that you need when you're trying to do this kind of work is a massive amount of data.

And so we saw a lot of deals get done through the year between health systems that have that information typically in the form of

patient records and the tech companies like Amazon and Google. So you know in

some ways you would be surprised to hear that in the second half of the year the big story was privacy because I think you know consumers were at large kind of got the case for what it really means to, you know, give up this information without consent.

And we got into some really interesting discussions about what it means to be de according to kind of privacy rules and regulations

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