of storage, so the infrastructure and costs associated with large-scale data collection can balloon quickly. For many smaller health systems, digitization is not yet worth the hassle.
Olson is a pathologist, and before beginning his role at the DIU, he served in the U.S. Navy. In 2018, he was sent to Guam, a U.S. island territory in Micronesia, where he worked as the laboratory medical director and blood bank director in the Naval Hospital. But Olson had dreamed up a tool like the ARM long before his time in Guam. On Aug. 10, 2016, while working as a resident in the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, Olson decided to message a connection he had at Google. In the email, which was viewed by CNBC, Olson described a rough idea of what a microscope like the ARM could be.
Shortly thereafter, the DIU began looking for commercial partners to help build and test the ARM. The organization picked the optical technology company Jenoptik to handle the hardware, and after evaluating 39 companies, it selected Google to develop the software.