In a deja-vu of sorts, Google is once again shuttering its health division. Just three years after the company hired Dr. David Feinberg to organize its disparate health efforts, its projects and employees will be shuffled across the company as he leaves for a new job as CEO of Cerner Corp.
According to a memo acquired by Insider, Google plans to shut down its health division and reassign its 570 employees. A Google spokesperson confirmed that the company will indeed dissolve Google Health, though it won’t lay off any employees and plans to continue some of its ongoing projects under different divisions.
The shift isn’t entirely a surprise. Earlier this summer, Google shuffled a portion of its health employees over to its Fitbit and Search divisions, leaving Fitbit to lead its consumer health efforts. Its remaining employees were focused on compliance, health AI and building tools for clinicians.
Now, the team led by Google’s Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo, which was focused on compliance, regulatory affairs and health equity, will take on a company-wide role. It will work across Google’s many divisions, including its cloud business, YouTube and Fitbit.
Google’s health AI team will report to Yossi Matias, who leads the company’s search and conversational AI efforts. And the team working on tools for doctors, such as Google’s controversial effort to make a searchable electronic health record, will report to Jeff Dean under Google’s AI division.
Despite the lack of a unified division, the spokesperson said health was still a big focus for Google, and had become more of a companywide effort. But this isn’t the first time Google has started — and shuttered — its healthcare division.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Back in 2008, Google launched an effort to bring together people’s health records, also called Google Health. Three years later, it shut down the platform, in part because it simply didn’t have enough users.
Still, 7wire Ventures Managing Partner Glen Tullman expects to see the company continue to try to crack the puzzle.
“The issues in healthcare aren’t going away, so I think we’ll still see efforts by Google and other tech players to develop technologies aimed at those challenges,” he wrote in an email. “That said, much of Google Health’s efforts centered around data mining and aggregations, initiatives that fit easily into other sectors of the economy but the healthcare industry is unique.”
Other large technology firms have stumbled recently in their own healthcare efforts.
Earlier this year, the infamous collaboration between Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway dissolved, with some experts pointing to the lack of a defined strategy as the fatal flaw. Since then, Amazon has launched its own primary care and pharmacy efforts, though it’s unclear if it will be able to unseat established competitors.
More recently, Insider reported that Apple planned to scale back a digital health app it had been developing to use in conjunction with its medical clinics for employees.
“Healthcare is hard” may be a common refrain when looking back at these failed projects, but that can be especially true as part of a larger company, even one with as many resources as Google or Amazon.
Large companies often run into challenges because they focus on how to apply their technologies to a problem, rather than on providing a different healthcare experience, Tullman said.
“It’s about the unnecessary barriers that make it harder for people to get the care they need – the costs, the lack of transparency, the access, the surprise bills. It’s everything that adds up to make a less than desirable experience for the people who are just trying to feel better and stay healthy,” he wrote. “The companies that focus on improving the health and care experience for the consumer, with tech as one piece of that puzzle, will be the ones that disrupt the industry. And people are eager to see it happen, because they want better for their themselves and their families.”
This article has been updated with comments from Glen Tullman.
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