Got health care skills? Big Tech wants to hire you

As tech giants like Amazon, Apple and Google place bigger and bigger bets on the U.S. health care system, it should come as no surprise that the rate at which they are hiring workers with health care skills is booming.

We took a deep dive into the big tech companies on this year’s LinkedIn Top Companies list in the U.S., uncovering the most popular health care skills among their workers — and what that says about the future of health care in America.

I identified 20 health care-related skills from LinkedIn Talent Insights that workers employed at tech companies would likely have on their LinkedIn profiles. The five most popular skills turned out to be health care, hospitals, health care information technology, HIPAA, and health care management. 

As of March of this year, about 10,000 professionals with health care skills listed on their LinkedIn profiles were employed by seven major tech players, according to LinkedIn Talent Insights. Those companies are Alphabet (No. 1 in the Top Companies list), Facebook (No. 2), Amazon (No. 3), Salesforce (No. 4), Uber (No. 6), Apple (No. 7) and Lyft (No. 19). That’s a 22% jump in employees with health care skills at these companies year over year.

(We exclude Microsoft from the Top Companies list because it is LinkedIn’s parent company. The company, which has a health care business, would rank fourth on Top Companies if it was included.)

These seven companies no longer dabble in health-related projects. They are building products and teams that aim to address some of the most trying problems in the $3.5 trillion U.S. health care industry, things like ensuring patients have transportation to and from doctors’ appointments and cutting down on the time physicians spend with the electronic health record.

They are also snapping up some of the most influential health care leaders in the country to run these businesses. Over the course of the last year, Dr. David Feinberg left his job as CEO of the high-profile Geisinger health system to lead Google’s health care business; Lyft hired Megan Callahan, a Change Healthcare and McKesson alum, as its first VP of health care; and Uber brought on Aaron Crowell from One Call Care Management as head of Uber Health.

Why now? It was only a decade ago that Google and Microsoft launched their own digital personal health records. And even though that big, audacious idea came from a pair of tech giants with strong track records, both platforms failed to gain much traction with consumers or providers. Google shut down its record in 2011, and Microsoft shuttered its system in March.

Fast forward to today, and the market now swings up or down based on Amazon’s reported health care musings. Google’s health care arm, Verily Life Sciences, has partnered with at least 19 legacy organizations, such as building a robotic surgery system with Johnson & Johnson and a type 2 diabetes monitoring program with Walgreens. And in documents filed for its initial public offering, Lyft counted HIPAA compliance as a risk factor in its business model as it pushes further in the medical transportation business.

“The early forays of Big Tech into health care made it clear that it wasn’t possible to just transplant tech culture onto health care to play in the field,” said Lisa Suennen, a longtime health care venture capitalist who runs the technology group at Manatt Ventures. “It was essential, instead, to combine the skills and talents of people from both industries to succeed here...That realization and the change of culture that allowed for this took a while to settle in.” 

Tech companies dug their heels into health care in 2018. That came in the form of new products like Apple’s medical record and market-moving deals like Amazon spending $1 billion to buy PillPack and reportedly beating out Walmart to buy the pharmacy delivery startup.

That said, tech’s “move fast and break things” mentality doesn’t always hold up in health care. “You can end up with dead patients,” said Matt Arnold, principal analyst at data consultancy Decision Resources Group. “These are industries and skill sets that have much to learn from each other.”

Tech leaders need to understand the health care industry’s regulatory boundaries, long buying cycles, demand for evidence and efficacy, and complex manner in which companies, providers and patients pay for medical goods and services in the U.S. But technology companies have something that health care desperately needs: the ability and know-how to create a good customer experience that could help improve patient satisfaction scores.

In fact, several open jobs at these companies highlight the role of the customer experience. A recent user experience design job at PillPack was listed as creating a “brand new customer experience on Amazon.” A job for a senior product designer for Uber for Business and Uber Health that is no longer taking applicants was described as needing to have the ability to craft “cohesive user experiences.”

“Health care really has everything to learn from tech, and its iterative, agile approach,” Arnold said. “This is all new stuff to the health care industry. They are not famous for providing a good user experience.”

Health care is taking note. Big Tech’s entry into the health care world has pushed legacy players to try new things in a way that would have been considered unprecedented a decade ago. Drugmakers, for example, are testing bringing digital medicines, such as the ones that pair oral medications with sensors to better track medication adherence, to market.

In a twist, health care organizations are starting to borrow from other hiring playbooks and are flipping it in their favor. Karenann Terrell, Walmart’s former CIO, is running digital at GlaxoSmithKline.

Tech’s move into health care shows no signs of slowing down. Just a few months ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that Apple's greatest contribution to mankind “will be about health.”

That’s a bold statement even from a company renowned for its innovation. But there are still two scenarios to keep an eye on. For one, not all companies will succeed in this space. Google and Microsoft’s personal health records showed us that. But other high-profile projects between tech companies and traditional health care players haven’t panned out as expected. Last year, Alcon, Novartis’s eye-care business, and Verily Life Sciences halted work on a project to develop a glucose-sensing contact lens.

The second thing to consider is that the traditional path for tech disruption often starts with partnership and ends with a takeover. “It’s an opportunity as well as a threat,” Suennen said. “We’re already seeing that.” Amazon sells white-label medical supplies, while Anne Wojcicki, CEO of genetic testing company 23andMe, said in February that a chunk of its new $250 million funding round will go toward drug development.

Either way, that may mean job opportunities on both sides of the aisle for workers who have the health care skill set likely to address big industry problems yet to be solved.

[Company insights were sourced from LinkedIn Talent Insights and include the parent company and majority-owned subsidiaries. Data reflects aggregated public member data from active LinkedIn profiles in the relevant country and includes full-time employee profiles associated with the parent company and majority-owned subsidiaries on LinkedIn. We exclude members who identify as part-time or contractors. All data is sourced from LinkedIn Talent Insights as of March 2019.]

You tell me. What health care skills should tech companies consider in their hiring plans?