9 ms·

Google is dismantling its health division

145 points by ra7 5y ago

ur-whale 5y ago
https://archive.ph/sycgo https://archive.ph/sycgo
- oenetan 5y ago
  thanks
ethbr0 5y ago
Turns out Google culturally has a hard time playing nice with other large partners? Color me shocked. Minor story as perspective. Initiative was hatched to extend Google Maps Street View inside of buildings. High level meetings were held. No technical roadblocks. Deal eventually killed, because Google was unwilling to provide their raw data to the buildings' owner, for their own uses. You're hamstringing a feature on your own app because you don't want to ship the data you collect to the person you're collecting it from? mind boggles
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  It’s arrogance *ingrained in the culture. I guess that’s what happens when you tell people that they’re special, constantly, while at work.
  - amsheehan 5y ago
    I don't think I'm breaking any NDAs by saying that that is just entirely not what happens.
    - nickff 5y ago
      >" I don't think I'm breaking any NDAs by saying that that is just entirely not what happens. " Could you please rephrase this? I don't understand that sentence.
      - prepend 5y ago
        Thanks I was wondering too. I think it means “it happens partially” but that can’t be right as it doesn’t seem noteworthy. Although glad that GP isn’t breaking NDAs with that fortune teller statement.
        rejectedandsad 5y ago
        My guess is that it was just a way to rebut the accusation by bragging about working there. I’m not sure that it worked though.
  - 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
    Bingo. This is it. Every Google employee thinks they are hot shit even when they get nothing done.
    - nebula8804 5y ago
      I wish I was a Google employee getting paid tons of money to get nothing done. Being Bighead is the American Dream. [1]:https://youtu.be/ZpL-ZBNiGjE?t=203 https://youtu.be/ZpL-ZBNiGjE?t=203
  - georgeburdell 5y ago
    To be fair this is what happens when you hire entirely from the technical Ivy League. No one wants to do the last 10% that's really the last 80% of the work because it doesn't carry the same visibility. For what it's worth, Google, or at least some subsegment, does seem to be trying to fix this issue. I had a somewhat offensive conversation with a recruiter recently where they told me they're looking for people (like me) with non-standard backgrounds who don't necessarily have the pedigree that the usual Google SWE hire has. I hope they also extend this thinking to moms with young children. I know a good many technical women who fell off the career ladder after having children and were never seem to be able to get a chance to get back on, ultimately taking jobs far beneath their abilities or just shifting industries altogether.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Apparently the "P" in your middle name stands for "non-standard Pedigree"?
    - analyst74 5y ago
      I think their elite school preference is only for new grads, the experienced pipeline has always been open to people with less pedigree.
      - rejectedandsad 5y ago
        They’ll give interviews to most and downplay the difficulty of the interviews on social forums in order to keep the accept rate low. You have to be an intellectual elite in order to pass the interviews either way.
  - mrRandomGuy 5y ago
    Look no further than when Google decided to deprecate `alert()` on Chrome. Bunch of clowns with their heads so far up their asses they're inside out.
    - lima 5y ago
      To be fair, deprecating that is a good idea. They botched the execution.
- mulmen 5y ago
  Depends on Google's philosophy. Are features a means to an end or the end itself? It's not surprising that Google would decide not to do something if it doesn't serve their goals.
- dheera 5y ago
  Oh yes. I stopped using Nest equipment after I encountered an API rate limit error. Excuse me? It's my device, don't rate limit me.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - vntok 5y ago
    What were you doing to reach the API limit? Were you circumventing the terms of use? Also, what do you mean, "it's my device. Don't rate limit me"? Do you own Nest's network? If not, why are you mixing owning a network with owing a device?
    - dheera 5y ago
      No. I own the device, I should have a way to get real time data and issue however many requests I want to it. It doesn't have to be through their network, they should provide a method of local access then.
- wmf 5y ago
  Didn't Google Books have the same policy with libraries? We scan your books and in exchange... of course we don't give you the scans.
  - tmccrary55 5y ago
    In exchange, we'll give each of you a 90 day free Stadia subscription!
  - caslon 5y ago
    The initial goal of Google Books was to make the scans publicly available to everyone, but then the copyright system got in the way. Blame our politicians, not Google, for that one.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    There was an excellent article [1] in The Atlantic about the Books project. It was really a tragic situation which no one in Congress of either party is interested in fixing. Full disclosure: I joined Google in 2005 when this was still an active project, and in fact walked around GWC-3 and saw the Yellow Badge people (great symbolism there) taking their breaks. These were contractors who actually scanned the books for Burger King-level wages, and whose badges wouldn't even let them into the micro-kitchens. Anyhow, I don't know if the University of Michigan (early volunteer) was supposed to get the scans. Supposedly, the whole world would. That didn't happen and you can read [1] for details. As of 2015, at least, not even a Google employee could get at them. I was told I could go to someone's desk and read the book on their computer if I really wanted to see it (this was for patent research). [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Emphasis plays a bit differently given increased awareness around diverse hiring, but as timely now as it was in 1981. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdjf4lMmiiI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdjf4lMmiiI
- spideymans 5y ago
  Google’s Sidewalk Labs “smart city” initiative in Toronto was canceled for similar reasons. Google wanted to collect all the data, refused to share any of the data with the municipality and refused to take any measures to address the privacy concerns. Google’s arrogance and their refusal to work with stakeholders in a productive manner insured the death of the proposal.
  - Gibbon1 5y ago
    That's another data point that supports my belief that google doesn't understand what a customer is.
    - shuntress 5y ago
      The customer is advertisers. The product is less valuable if the customer can get it somewhere other than Google.
adolph 5y ago
Feinberg to Cerner is mildly interesting since Geisinger is an Epic customer.
kixiQu 5y ago
Who could have seen this coming?
dhosek 5y ago
Hmm, I did some contracting work for a hospital system that was heavily invested in Google Health for the EHR systems. I think a lot of that work was not going to be easily moved to another platform. I wonder what happens to them now?
- Chabsff 5y ago
  According to the article, it's not the products that are being shutdown, just the centralized organization structure around them. It's safe the expect that at least some of the projects will be terminated as well, but for the most part, it seems like this is just a removal of a (presumably redundant) layer of management.
gundmc 5y ago
The road to healthcare tech is littered with bodies of failed efforts from all kinds of companies. Seems like a particularly hard segment to break into. I'm not exactly sure what the biggest reason for that is. Regulations? Social relationships/politics? Difficult to understand processes and landscape? Resistance to change? Maybe a mix of all of these?
- kirykl 5y ago
  It’s that Insurance (private or gov) is always going to cap the market. Opportunity cost is too great when returns elsewhere is uncapped
- leovander 5y ago
  Money and all of the above.
- outside1234 5y ago
  All of them - plus long long long timeframes to get anything done.
- gopher_space 5y ago
  I've seen people do well by targeting specific processes around an illness. IMHO the landscape is so fragmented that a holistic approach would never make sense except as a government initiative.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Is that obstacle removed in countries with national healthcare programs of some sort?
- crazygringo 5y ago
  It's very similar to education. Neither health care nor education function anything like a "free market" so the normal business strategies don't apply. And it's so many things -- it's regulation, it's slow-moving, it's hyper-local and non-uniform, it's privacy concerns, it's vested interests, it's interoperability, it's political. Both health care and education have huge amounts of money poured into them -- the money spent on a child's education per-year is orders of magnitude greater than a Netflix or Spotify subscription. Same with your monthly health insurance costs. So despite all the challenges I listed above (and more), it still seems like if you can pull it off, it's a bet worth making. But that doesn't stop it from being really, really hard.
motohagiography 5y ago
I can't even write a simple comment about health tech without going on for multiple paragraphs. Truly, it is a wicked problem. Have said this before, but healthcare is the Afghanistan of tech where giant empires go in thinking they can solve it and leave beaten years later wondering what happened. We're still about 5 years before a viable tech gets traction that could be useful in that space, and interestingly imo, one of the YC 2021 batch is the most well positioned to do it because they are doing authorization as a service (warrant.dev), which could meet the basic delegation need which is the pattern the whole health world is predicated on. We do collaboration pretty well with tech and we're just starting to make headway on identity and access control, but we haven't figured out workflow delegation and designation in any meaningful and open federated way, which is the necessary condition of the basic physician/nurse, physician/specialist, physician/hygenist, physician/orderly etc. workflow pattern. What people don't get about healthcare is that it is not a vertical or a sector, it is a parallel planned economy of autonomous entities, not unlike higher education but more distributed. I have done a lot of consulting work in a very large single payer system over the years, and the reocurring pattern is that even government thinks it's an enterprise, or a collection of enterprises. It's really an archipeligo of federated diverse organizations that orbit doctors and other health care providers. When you think, "oh, I've got a document management system or search for health!" you don't unless it is document management or search for a hyper-federation (like a hypergraph). You don't build products for this, you build tools, and the "healthiness" of a given tech is about how it supports this complex and dynamic relationship pattern. If I were google developing technologies for health, I'd be solving the basic hyperfederation problems. I hate to say it, but from a technology perspesctive, it's very likely a blockchain problem, where the health ontology (HL7,FHIR, etc) gets distributed via the consensus, and individual records would be graphs over its elements. Unfortunately, HL7 suffers from the same architecture complexity problem, where complex standards and rules yield stupid behavior in the field. This is to say the problem is health information techs all fail for the same reason, which is the basic problem of imposing central or top down design models on a stubbornly bottom up economy full of non-technologists.
- SamuelAdams 5y ago
  Good points in here. If you want to read a good book that discusses all the different players in healthcare, i recommend “An American Sickness” by Elisabeth Rosenthal. It does a great job pointing out the various players and the conflicting interests between them. Highly recommend for anyone looking to learn more.
prepend 5y ago
Again? I had a colleague go work for Google health in a fairly high role, but I didn’t know them well enough to ask why. Seeing what they did, it was a lot of positive sounding, but vapid, content put out and I could never tell what they did. I kept thinking, “who would work for them when they’ll just get bored of this as PR?”
- NelsonMinar 5y ago
  I remember the 2006 era version of Google Health that also failed and the executive in charge went off to found his own health startup (which itself failed).
randycupertino 5y ago
Does this include Verily, which is part of Alphabet? They just got funding last year: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/yea-verily-google-s-health-focused-sibling-secures-700m-to-rapidly-scale-up-commercial-work https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/yea-verily-google-s-he...
- FartyMcFarter 5y ago
  Verily is not part of Google, so I'd think it's not part of Google Health either by definition.
  - codred 5y ago
    Wrong. Check your sources.
    - FartyMcFarter 5y ago
      I did. They say that Verily is a part of Alphabet. What do your sources say?
duffpkg 5y ago
What is really unfortunate and not communicated in this article is just how much Google's various star crossed forays into healthcare took oxygen from other fruitful and deserving efforts. It's an indictment of healthcare institutions as well for falling for it every time one of the tech megaliths promises the moon. At ClearHealth we lost many, many potential projects, partners and dollars over the years to "we are going to see what google is doing", "we are in talks with google", etc. The damage is very large but difficult to calculate.
- papito 5y ago
  Rule of thumb - ignore what Google does. Their lack of focus and proclivity to murder projects that are not runaway success without years of hard slogging has a solid track record.
- lvspiff 5y ago
  I hear ya - at UNH if I had a dollar for every time I heard "We are in talks with google to do X" I'd be a very rich man. For years Google Glass in healthcare were the buzz words everyone wanted but could never put together. Google FHIR integration was always just over the horizon. Not surprised to hear their healthcare efforts are folding but like you I feel the disappointment.
  - yonaguska 5y ago
    I'm so glad UNH never partnered with Google. I would have been planning an exit strategy for all my stocks ASAP.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  IME, this phenomenon is not limited to healthcare.
happiness_idx 5y ago
Do I read the article by paying for it?
- oenetan 5y ago
  https://archive.ph/sycgo https://archive.ph/sycgo
FartyMcFarter 5y ago
Sounds like the projects will continue under different parts of the company?
sankumsek 5y ago
Doesn't look like it's actually being shut down. Just a re-org under Jeff Dean and some other leaders? It could have just been a leadership issue, but I don't want to suggest that Google has given up on Health altogether.
- codred 5y ago
  True. It's just a reorg with business as usual.
charles_f 5y ago
Between Google's habit of handling data carelessly (mining data it shouldn't[1][2], keeping your data when you delete it[3], let others look into your data[4]), as a consumer I can't say I'm sad ; especially when you end up not having a choice, since the decision is made by your healthcare provider - and you might end up in their records without even knowing. Not that others may necessarily be better, but they also don't have the same existing power. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/google-sued-u-s-tracking-users-private-internet-browsing-n1222676 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/google-sued-u-s-tracki... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-sells-future-powered-your-personal-data-n870501 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-sells-future-p... [3] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/chrome-69-keeps-googles-cookies-after-you-clear-browser-data/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/chrome-69-keeps... [4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/techs-dirty-secret-the-app-developers-sifting-through-your-gmail-1530544442 https://www.wsj.com/articles/techs-dirty-secret-the-app-deve...
- codred 5y ago
  I hope you people realize that Health data handling is a heavily regulated area. If you break the rules you will face penalties. Plus what kind of data expected to be shared? Your blood pressure or allergy reaction to penicillin? The real goal of the project is not to steal and trade your data but to help clinicians find consolidated data about you faster and spend more time to help the patient.
sjg007 5y ago
I mean if Google is serious they should buy Cerner and a few medical device manufacturers. I don’t see federation of health records as all that interesting. Most people get comprehensive care from a major hospital.. I’ve taken records from one place to another and guess what, it’s basically a DVD of PDFs and images. I don’t actually think it’s a real use case when you are in a network like that.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
Techbros are like moths to a candle when it comes to healthcare. There's a vast amount of money in it, a lot of the processes appear to be (or are) clunky and crufty, and you get to pretend you're just out to save the world while you make your first billion. But the unfortunate reality is you can't just go "hack stuff", disrupt some paradigms, craft a few apps, throw in some AI, sprinkle some crypto around, code it all up in the cool language and technology stack of the month, and come up with something useful. It's long hard thankless grinding work that's frequently blocked by regulations, risk adverse institutions, interoperability with legacy systems, and people and business processes more so than simple matters of technology. You also have to accept you frequently won't be the smartest person in the room when you're dealing with healthcare professionals, which is real kryptonite to a lot of move-fast-and-break-stuff types.
haihaibye 5y ago
> Generally, health is just so heavily regulated. It’s just a painful business to be in. It’s just not necessarily how I want to spend my time. -Serge Brin, 2014

145 points by ra7 5y ago

ur-whale 5y ago

https://archive.ph/sycgo https://archive.ph/sycgo

oenetan 5y ago
thanks

ethbr0 5y ago

Turns out Google culturally has a hard time playing nice with other large partners? Color me shocked. Minor story as perspective. Initiative was hatched to extend Google Maps Street View inside of buildings. High level meetings were held. No technical roadblocks. Deal eventually killed, because Google was unwilling to provide their raw data to the buildings' owner, for their own uses. You're hamstringing a feature on your own app because you don't want to ship the data you collect to the person you're collecting it from? mind boggles

rejectedandsad 5y ago
It’s arrogance *ingrained in the culture. I guess that’s what happens when you tell people that they’re special, constantly, while at work.
- amsheehan 5y ago
  I don't think I'm breaking any NDAs by saying that that is just entirely not what happens.
  - nickff 5y ago
    >" I don't think I'm breaking any NDAs by saying that that is just entirely not what happens. " Could you please rephrase this? I don't understand that sentence.
    - prepend 5y ago
      Thanks I was wondering too. I think it means “it happens partially” but that can’t be right as it doesn’t seem noteworthy. Although glad that GP isn’t breaking NDAs with that fortune teller statement.
      - rejectedandsad 5y ago
        My guess is that it was just a way to rebut the accusation by bragging about working there. I’m not sure that it worked though.
- 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
  Bingo. This is it. Every Google employee thinks they are hot shit even when they get nothing done.
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    I wish I was a Google employee getting paid tons of money to get nothing done. Being Bighead is the American Dream. [1]:https://youtu.be/ZpL-ZBNiGjE?t=203 https://youtu.be/ZpL-ZBNiGjE?t=203
- georgeburdell 5y ago
  To be fair this is what happens when you hire entirely from the technical Ivy League. No one wants to do the last 10% that's really the last 80% of the work because it doesn't carry the same visibility. For what it's worth, Google, or at least some subsegment, does seem to be trying to fix this issue. I had a somewhat offensive conversation with a recruiter recently where they told me they're looking for people (like me) with non-standard backgrounds who don't necessarily have the pedigree that the usual Google SWE hire has. I hope they also extend this thinking to moms with young children. I know a good many technical women who fell off the career ladder after having children and were never seem to be able to get a chance to get back on, ultimately taking jobs far beneath their abilities or just shifting industries altogether.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Apparently the "P" in your middle name stands for "non-standard Pedigree"?
  - analyst74 5y ago
    I think their elite school preference is only for new grads, the experienced pipeline has always been open to people with less pedigree.
    - rejectedandsad 5y ago
      They’ll give interviews to most and downplay the difficulty of the interviews on social forums in order to keep the accept rate low. You have to be an intellectual elite in order to pass the interviews either way.
- mrRandomGuy 5y ago
  Look no further than when Google decided to deprecate `alert()` on Chrome. Bunch of clowns with their heads so far up their asses they're inside out.
  - lima 5y ago
    To be fair, deprecating that is a good idea. They botched the execution.
mulmen 5y ago
Depends on Google's philosophy. Are features a means to an end or the end itself? It's not surprising that Google would decide not to do something if it doesn't serve their goals.
dheera 5y ago
Oh yes. I stopped using Nest equipment after I encountered an API rate limit error. Excuse me? It's my device, don't rate limit me.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- vntok 5y ago
  What were you doing to reach the API limit? Were you circumventing the terms of use? Also, what do you mean, "it's my device. Don't rate limit me"? Do you own Nest's network? If not, why are you mixing owning a network with owing a device?
  - dheera 5y ago
    No. I own the device, I should have a way to get real time data and issue however many requests I want to it. It doesn't have to be through their network, they should provide a method of local access then.
wmf 5y ago
Didn't Google Books have the same policy with libraries? We scan your books and in exchange... of course we don't give you the scans.
- tmccrary55 5y ago
  In exchange, we'll give each of you a 90 day free Stadia subscription!
- caslon 5y ago
  The initial goal of Google Books was to make the scans publicly available to everyone, but then the copyright system got in the way. Blame our politicians, not Google, for that one.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  There was an excellent article [1] in The Atlantic about the Books project. It was really a tragic situation which no one in Congress of either party is interested in fixing. Full disclosure: I joined Google in 2005 when this was still an active project, and in fact walked around GWC-3 and saw the Yellow Badge people (great symbolism there) taking their breaks. These were contractors who actually scanned the books for Burger King-level wages, and whose badges wouldn't even let them into the micro-kitchens. Anyhow, I don't know if the University of Michigan (early volunteer) was supposed to get the scans. Supposedly, the whole world would. That didn't happen and you can read [1] for details. As of 2015, at least, not even a Google employee could get at them. I was told I could go to someone's desk and read the book on their computer if I really wanted to see it (this was for patent research). [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Emphasis plays a bit differently given increased awareness around diverse hiring, but as timely now as it was in 1981. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdjf4lMmiiI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdjf4lMmiiI
spideymans 5y ago
Google’s Sidewalk Labs “smart city” initiative in Toronto was canceled for similar reasons. Google wanted to collect all the data, refused to share any of the data with the municipality and refused to take any measures to address the privacy concerns. Google’s arrogance and their refusal to work with stakeholders in a productive manner insured the death of the proposal.
- Gibbon1 5y ago
  That's another data point that supports my belief that google doesn't understand what a customer is.
  - shuntress 5y ago
    The customer is advertisers. The product is less valuable if the customer can get it somewhere other than Google.

adolph 5y ago

Feinberg to Cerner is mildly interesting since Geisinger is an Epic customer.

kixiQu 5y ago

Who could have seen this coming?

dhosek 5y ago

Hmm, I did some contracting work for a hospital system that was heavily invested in Google Health for the EHR systems. I think a lot of that work was not going to be easily moved to another platform. I wonder what happens to them now?

Chabsff 5y ago
According to the article, it's not the products that are being shutdown, just the centralized organization structure around them. It's safe the expect that at least some of the projects will be terminated as well, but for the most part, it seems like this is just a removal of a (presumably redundant) layer of management.

gundmc 5y ago

The road to healthcare tech is littered with bodies of failed efforts from all kinds of companies. Seems like a particularly hard segment to break into. I'm not exactly sure what the biggest reason for that is. Regulations? Social relationships/politics? Difficult to understand processes and landscape? Resistance to change? Maybe a mix of all of these?

kirykl 5y ago
It’s that Insurance (private or gov) is always going to cap the market. Opportunity cost is too great when returns elsewhere is uncapped
leovander 5y ago
Money and all of the above.
outside1234 5y ago
All of them - plus long long long timeframes to get anything done.
gopher_space 5y ago
I've seen people do well by targeting specific processes around an illness. IMHO the landscape is so fragmented that a holistic approach would never make sense except as a government initiative.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Is that obstacle removed in countries with national healthcare programs of some sort?
crazygringo 5y ago
It's very similar to education. Neither health care nor education function anything like a "free market" so the normal business strategies don't apply. And it's so many things -- it's regulation, it's slow-moving, it's hyper-local and non-uniform, it's privacy concerns, it's vested interests, it's interoperability, it's political. Both health care and education have huge amounts of money poured into them -- the money spent on a child's education per-year is orders of magnitude greater than a Netflix or Spotify subscription. Same with your monthly health insurance costs. So despite all the challenges I listed above (and more), it still seems like if you can pull it off, it's a bet worth making. But that doesn't stop it from being really, really hard.

motohagiography 5y ago

I can't even write a simple comment about health tech without going on for multiple paragraphs. Truly, it is a wicked problem. Have said this before, but healthcare is the Afghanistan of tech where giant empires go in thinking they can solve it and leave beaten years later wondering what happened. We're still about 5 years before a viable tech gets traction that could be useful in that space, and interestingly imo, one of the YC 2021 batch is the most well positioned to do it because they are doing authorization as a service (warrant.dev), which could meet the basic delegation need which is the pattern the whole health world is predicated on. We do collaboration pretty well with tech and we're just starting to make headway on identity and access control, but we haven't figured out workflow delegation and designation in any meaningful and open federated way, which is the necessary condition of the basic physician/nurse, physician/specialist, physician/hygenist, physician/orderly etc. workflow pattern. What people don't get about healthcare is that it is not a vertical or a sector, it is a parallel planned economy of autonomous entities, not unlike higher education but more distributed. I have done a lot of consulting work in a very large single payer system over the years, and the reocurring pattern is that even government thinks it's an enterprise, or a collection of enterprises. It's really an archipeligo of federated diverse organizations that orbit doctors and other health care providers. When you think, "oh, I've got a document management system or search for health!" you don't unless it is document management or search for a hyper-federation (like a hypergraph). You don't build products for this, you build tools, and the "healthiness" of a given tech is about how it supports this complex and dynamic relationship pattern. If I were google developing technologies for health, I'd be solving the basic hyperfederation problems. I hate to say it, but from a technology perspesctive, it's very likely a blockchain problem, where the health ontology (HL7,FHIR, etc) gets distributed via the consensus, and individual records would be graphs over its elements. Unfortunately, HL7 suffers from the same architecture complexity problem, where complex standards and rules yield stupid behavior in the field. This is to say the problem is health information techs all fail for the same reason, which is the basic problem of imposing central or top down design models on a stubbornly bottom up economy full of non-technologists.

SamuelAdams 5y ago
Good points in here. If you want to read a good book that discusses all the different players in healthcare, i recommend “An American Sickness” by Elisabeth Rosenthal. It does a great job pointing out the various players and the conflicting interests between them. Highly recommend for anyone looking to learn more.

prepend 5y ago

Again? I had a colleague go work for Google health in a fairly high role, but I didn’t know them well enough to ask why. Seeing what they did, it was a lot of positive sounding, but vapid, content put out and I could never tell what they did. I kept thinking, “who would work for them when they’ll just get bored of this as PR?”

NelsonMinar 5y ago
I remember the 2006 era version of Google Health that also failed and the executive in charge went off to found his own health startup (which itself failed).

randycupertino 5y ago

Does this include Verily, which is part of Alphabet? They just got funding last year: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/yea-verily-google-s-health-focused-sibling-secures-700m-to-rapidly-scale-up-commercial-work https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/yea-verily-google-s-he...

FartyMcFarter 5y ago
Verily is not part of Google, so I'd think it's not part of Google Health either by definition.
- codred 5y ago
  Wrong. Check your sources.
  - FartyMcFarter 5y ago
    I did. They say that Verily is a part of Alphabet. What do your sources say?

duffpkg 5y ago

What is really unfortunate and not communicated in this article is just how much Google's various star crossed forays into healthcare took oxygen from other fruitful and deserving efforts. It's an indictment of healthcare institutions as well for falling for it every time one of the tech megaliths promises the moon. At ClearHealth we lost many, many potential projects, partners and dollars over the years to "we are going to see what google is doing", "we are in talks with google", etc. The damage is very large but difficult to calculate.

papito 5y ago
Rule of thumb - ignore what Google does. Their lack of focus and proclivity to murder projects that are not runaway success without years of hard slogging has a solid track record.
lvspiff 5y ago
I hear ya - at UNH if I had a dollar for every time I heard "We are in talks with google to do X" I'd be a very rich man. For years Google Glass in healthcare were the buzz words everyone wanted but could never put together. Google FHIR integration was always just over the horizon. Not surprised to hear their healthcare efforts are folding but like you I feel the disappointment.
- yonaguska 5y ago
  I'm so glad UNH never partnered with Google. I would have been planning an exit strategy for all my stocks ASAP.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
IME, this phenomenon is not limited to healthcare.

happiness_idx 5y ago

Do I read the article by paying for it?

oenetan 5y ago
https://archive.ph/sycgo https://archive.ph/sycgo

FartyMcFarter 5y ago

Sounds like the projects will continue under different parts of the company?

sankumsek 5y ago

Doesn't look like it's actually being shut down. Just a re-org under Jeff Dean and some other leaders? It could have just been a leadership issue, but I don't want to suggest that Google has given up on Health altogether.

codred 5y ago
True. It's just a reorg with business as usual.

charles_f 5y ago

Between Google's habit of handling data carelessly (mining data it shouldn't[1][2], keeping your data when you delete it[3], let others look into your data[4]), as a consumer I can't say I'm sad ; especially when you end up not having a choice, since the decision is made by your healthcare provider - and you might end up in their records without even knowing. Not that others may necessarily be better, but they also don't have the same existing power. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/google-sued-u-s-tracking-users-private-internet-browsing-n1222676 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/google-sued-u-s-tracki... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-sells-future-powered-your-personal-data-n870501 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-sells-future-p... [3] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/chrome-69-keeps-googles-cookies-after-you-clear-browser-data/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/chrome-69-keeps... [4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/techs-dirty-secret-the-app-developers-sifting-through-your-gmail-1530544442 https://www.wsj.com/articles/techs-dirty-secret-the-app-deve...

codred 5y ago
I hope you people realize that Health data handling is a heavily regulated area. If you break the rules you will face penalties. Plus what kind of data expected to be shared? Your blood pressure or allergy reaction to penicillin? The real goal of the project is not to steal and trade your data but to help clinicians find consolidated data about you faster and spend more time to help the patient.

sjg007 5y ago

I mean if Google is serious they should buy Cerner and a few medical device manufacturers. I don’t see federation of health records as all that interesting. Most people get comprehensive care from a major hospital.. I’ve taken records from one place to another and guess what, it’s basically a DVD of PDFs and images. I don’t actually think it’s a real use case when you are in a network like that.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

Techbros are like moths to a candle when it comes to healthcare. There's a vast amount of money in it, a lot of the processes appear to be (or are) clunky and crufty, and you get to pretend you're just out to save the world while you make your first billion. But the unfortunate reality is you can't just go "hack stuff", disrupt some paradigms, craft a few apps, throw in some AI, sprinkle some crypto around, code it all up in the cool language and technology stack of the month, and come up with something useful. It's long hard thankless grinding work that's frequently blocked by regulations, risk adverse institutions, interoperability with legacy systems, and people and business processes more so than simple matters of technology. You also have to accept you frequently won't be the smartest person in the room when you're dealing with healthcare professionals, which is real kryptonite to a lot of move-fast-and-break-stuff types.

haihaibye 5y ago

> Generally, health is just so heavily regulated. It’s just a painful business to be in. It’s just not necessarily how I want to spend my time. -Serge Brin, 2014