- Google is rethinking its strategy in healthcare, dispersing its health group throughout the company.
- Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo laid out how the new approach could make a mark.
- The goal is to help billions of people make decisions about their health.
Google's healthcare team is starting a new chapter.
The health unit was brought together in 2019 to carve out Google's future in the healthcare industry. But Google Health disbanded in August, as Insider reported, and sent health employees across the company to work on Google's existing products and services instead.
"What you're seeing in this next iteration of our journey is based on what we've learned across the pandemic and based upon how we see that people are turning to us in those everyday moments," DeSalvo said in a conversation with Insider at the Hlth conference in Boston.
The idea is to think about health as an all-of-Google enterprise, rather than a separate department.
By dispersing the teams, Google wants to help people understand health-related assets in their communities, reach consumers, and aid clinicians within health systems. DeSalvo said she aspired to have her growing team of clinicians work with other Google employees on projects in Search, Google Cloud, YouTube, and more, infusing them with a healthcare perspective.
Google's goal isn't to build a healthcare business
Google's approach to healthcare has evolved over time. While the thinking was to build a new line of business for Google in health, the company is now focused on having an influence on how people access healthcare, DeSalvo said.
But in the absence of a company trying to grow revenue, it can be difficult to know whether it's making a mark. Measuring success is something DeSalvo's team is asking itself about every day, she said.
In areas with products, it's straightforward. For Google Cloud, the health team can look at the cloud's reach. For a device like Nest, a smart-home system, it might be the number of times people turn to the product for information.
But DeSalvo said she wanted Google to think bigger than working on specific healthcare projects.
"It's not about only a product or service, or even an AI tool, that helps in one particular area," DeSalvo said. Instead, it's finding ways to influence the health of billions of people, she added.
A chance to affect billions
DeSalvo spent time at the US Department of Health and Human Services and as the health commissioner of New Orleans before joining Google in 2019. Growing up, she said she loved the idea of combining science and helping people. That led her to become a doctor, a role in which she started thinking about the broader healthcare system.
"I could provide great quality care to that patient in front of me, but if they had access challenges to the clinic because we didn't have a culturally or linguistically appropriate system, it wasn't going to help them," DeSalvo said.
When Google reached out to her, that drive to help more people — billions this time — drew her in.
"It's about really thinking about how to directly work with people in the end communities," DeSalvo said, "to give them the tools and the information that give them more control and that give them a sense of their ownership, but also some power in that equation with the care system."
On February 28, Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, joined 31 other media groups and filed a $2.3 billion suit against Google in Dutch court, alleging losses suffered due to the company's advertising practices.
