Podcast: Amazon's Path of Disruption

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Happy Friday, and welcome to the wonderful world of Data Book. Healthcare has plenty of great stories, and your cohosts, Jack Murtha and Tom Castles, are eager to bring you this one. Well, it might not be a healthcare story yet, but it is most definitely blossoming into one.

This is a tech story. It’s an innovation story. It’s a disruption story. It’s the Amazon story.

The country’s great disrupters have a new target: healthcare. Amazon, Google, Apple, and even Uber—they’re all trying to improve American medicine. But can tech change such a complex system?

To find out, Data Book explores Amazon’s history, from Jeff Bezos’s not-so-humble beginnings and the birth of a scrappy online bookstore to web and retail domination. Now a household name, Amazon is marching into healthcare, though its precise goals and plans of attack remain unclear. The story of Amazon is an important one, especially now, because it is essentially a track record of game-changing success.

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But Amazon is only part of the equation. For everything else, we interview Kate McCarthy, a senior health-tech analyst for Forrester. She helps healthcare leaders navigate the increasingly high-tech industry, and she helps Data Book understand what these Silicon Valley disrupters are trying to do and how they’re going about it. She even offers a prediction.

Finally, we close out with an insight from our own assistant editor, Ryan Black, who’s been covering tech disruption in healthcare for some time now. He gives us the scoop on what the industry thinks of these outsiders.

Listen and subscribe to Data Book on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, and all of your favorite podcasting apps. We publish new episodes on the best stories and insights in big data, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity at 8 a.m. every Friday.

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