Google is betting its future on health care, but the company’s journey so far has been a little bumpy. In 2021, three years after its creation, Google disbanded its health care division. The dissolution came after group leader David Feinberg left the company to become CEO of electronic health record company Cerner. Since then, Karen DeSalvo, a former Obama health official, has taken over and is managing staff distributed through various Google teams. Under her watch, Google has optimized search and YouTube to better answer common health questions, updated its consumer health wearables to function more like medical devices and built artificial intelligence products to meet industry demands. At times, the company has stumbled. In the pandemic’s early days, Google scrambled to address Covid health misinformation on YouTube. Then, after a Supreme Court decision overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, research revealed that Google Maps was directing abortion seekers to anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers. Despite missteps, Google is pressing on in health care. DeSalvo chatted with Ruth at Google’s annual health event, The Checkup, about the company’s plans. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. What is one of your biggest priorities for Google in health care? I'm very keen to see that this thing (she points to her Google phone) becomes a doctor in your pocket. What are the things that we can enable in self-care? And then, what are the things that can support the caregiver? It’s related to: How do you access information, whether that’s on Search or YouTube, or have access to telehealth? So much that will happen just from a device that’s honestly pretty inexpensive and in the hands of a huge chunk of the planet. People during the pandemic in America spoke loudly and clearly that they want more agency and control. People want to not have to be so reliant on the house of medicine to learn about their health. Health care feels like a long-term play for Google. How big could it be? It is a long-term play for us. And the reason it’s an important use case is because [on search] people are asking health questions. We’ve got to get it right. And we have got to help them on their journey. On our [wearables like Fitbit], people don’t just want to count steps. They want to make sure that they’re being healthier. Cloud is [becoming] a trillion-dollar global industry. Thirty percent of the world’s data is health care. In our ethos as Google is to co-build and partner. [An organization] had a problem to solve. We had technical people who could think about it with them and solve it. But then they can take it out and scale it. And that those things do take longer. But we are also getting faster. We’re learning how to do those with more rapidity. So it is a long-term play in the sense of we’re going to be in it. You've hired the former FDA head of digital health, Bakul Patel, and you’ve been partnering with a lot of global health institutions like the World Health Organization on artificial intelligence that could screen for various conditions like tuberculosis or diabetic retinopathy. How does regulation factor into your strategy, not just in the U.S. but globally. To get scale, we have to make sure that we’re doing it in a way [so] that it’s not just about endorsement. This opportunity that we forged more formally with the WHO during the pandemic has … really helped us say, look, there’s a backbone organization that can help us understand what the challenges are. Let’s not just make it a pandemic thing. Let’s figure out what we can do going forward.
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