Google and Apple Both Scaling Back Healthcare Efforts

Looks like Google and Apple have both run into the proverbial healthcare wall that so many have faced.  In fact, in Google’s case, we can say that they’ve ran into this wall…again.  Yes, in some ways this feels like Groundhog Day for those of us who have followed this industry for as long as we have here at Healthcare IT Today.  Most of you will remember the patient portal/PHR that was called Google Health.  It was shutdown before really making any sort of impact.  However, given the size of the healthcare market, you had to wonder when Google would return again and return they did.

Google’s return to healthcare was little by little with a number of very targeted projects that were eventually pulled together under one umbrella called Google Health (why not reuse the name right?).  When you look at the list of big names they brought on to the Google Health team, you could see they were really investing in healthcare in a way they hadn’t done previously.  Most prominent on the Google Health Team is Dr. Karen DeSalvo who is still Google’s Chief Health Officer and of course Dr. David Feinberg who was tapped to run Google Health after being President and CEO of Geisinger Health.

Yesterday, news broke that Dr. Feinberg was leaving Google Health in order to be CEO of Cerner.  Now, Business Insider is reporting that Google is shutting down the Google Health division that Dr. Feinberg led and projects will be split across other parts of Google.  Did Dr. Feinberg see the writing on the wall or is him leaving prompting the reorganization?  Hard to say.  However, what’s clear from this reorganization is less of a focus on healthcare by Google.

From my perspective, the Google Health team didn’t have a lot of cohesion around the projects they were working on.  There were a lot of healthcare related projects that impacted various Google products, but I didn’t see the real vision for Google in healthcare.  You see this in the health related features they added to things like Search, maps and YouTube.  Massive projects that impacted billions of people and needed real healthcare expertise, but they weren’t really a healthcare project per se.  The closest they came to a big healthcare project was their pseudo-EHR tool that felt like an awkward redesign of an EHR that had some interesting ideas but never quite fit into the health IT landscape.

Also worth noting is that Google’s biggest play in healthcare has been Google Cloud and their Google Workspace (Formerly GSuite which includes email, docs, calendar, meet, etc) products.  Those are largely separate teams that occasionally would work with Google Health.  Google is definitely still in the healthcare business, but the dismantling of Google Health and moving those projects to other divisions says a lot about where they see opportunities for them in healthcare.  Also, I won’t be surprised if Google continues its efforts around health data and AI that many know about because of Google’s Project Nightingale with Accension which ran into privacy issues.  These efforts capitalize on an expertise in data and AI that most other companies don’t have.  I bet this will be included with Google Cloud much like Amazon has done with its healthcare AI efforts under AWS.

In other news, Apple is also reportedly scaling back its efforts in healthcare.  They’d been running an ambitious project called “HealthHabit” with some of their employees to track fitness goals, talk to clinicians, and manage hypertension.  The idea was that if it was successful internally, they could make it into a product for iPhone users one day.  They reportedly had a team of more than 50 people working on this.

Despite all this effort, Apple is scaling back efforts on this project.  It’s not clear from the reporting whether HealthHabit will continue with a small team or not, but the people working on the project will need to find another role at Apple or be laid off with severance according to the report.

This report is interesting since a few years back Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, said that health will be Apple’s “Greatest Contribution to Mankind.”  I guess the end of one health project at Apple doesn’t spell the doom of this prediction.  Plus, I know a lot of healthcare startups that are using Apple Health Kit as their approach to interoperability.  However, it does illustrate how hard it is for a tech company to really make a deep impact in healthcare.  Even a tech company with the resources and skillset of Apple.

While it would be interesting to say that this is a sign of Google and Apple choosing to get out of the healthcare business, we’ve been here before.  Healthcare is just too large of a business for companies like Google and Apple with billions of dollars of cash to ignore.  I expect this current scaling back is more about them stepping back to evaluate what’s worked and what hasn’t.  Then, in time they’ll take those learnings (hopefully) and be back to try and be a bigger part of healthcare again.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • Dr. Simpson,
    I don’t think I ever said Google wasn’t poised to buy Cerner. In fact, I have a draft title of an article about Google buying Cerner. Although, it’s all just speculation right now. I’m waiting for some more data to support the idea. However, the angle of sending Dr. Feinberg in to help make the acquisition happen is interesting.

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