Google hires health sector CEO to organize fragmented health initiatives



[ad_1]

Google hired David Feinberg, CEO of Geisinger Health, to oversee its many health initiatives. He reported to Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer Jeff Dean and worked closely with CEO Sundar Pichai to organize various health initiatives.

Google has been interested in health care for some time. His current efforts are quite fragmented and involve several teams and Alphabet's parent companies, including Nest, Verily, Calico, DeepMind and Google Fit. In 2008, Google launched a project called Google Health, which aimed to unify the medical data of patients stored by different providers. It finally collapsed in 2013 and paved the way for Google Fit, a fitness ecosystem for Android phones and WearOS smartwatches. Google Fit is so far the only consumer product focused on health. However, Nest, a subsidiary of Google Home, would also work to enter the digital health sector.



In July, it was reported that Nest had quietly acquired the Senosis health monitoring software. CNBC reported that the company was discussing with seniors' homes the incorporation of Nest devices that can detect falls and automatically turn on lights with motion detectors when people wake up in the middle of the night to go to bathroom.

Feinberg's director, Jeff Dean, heads up Google's Artificial Intelligence Research Division, which runs Google Brain, an in-depth AI learning research team that is sometimes referred to internally as "medical brain". According to CNBC, Google's Brain recently focused on a research project called Medical Digital. Assist, who uses AI-based speech recognition to help doctors take notes during a visit to the hospital.

Other Google teams, such as Search and Cloud, support the company's health initiatives in a more subtle way, such as adding verified health information in the Knowledge Graph and offering cloud services to providers. health care. Last July, Google Cloud hired Toby Cosgrove, former CEO of Cleveland Clinic, to advise the team. Cosgrove said that he was particularly interested in creating applications to help modernize hospitals.

Google's parent company, Alphabet, invests and also owns two research and development organizations, Verily and Calico. More recently, scientists at Google and Verily used machine learning to analyze optical scan data sets of 300,000 patients to assess the patient's risk of heart disease. Calico, on the other hand, has more worrisome goals of "healing death" to extend the life of human life. Recognized with a $ 1.5 billion investment from Google, the company has been studying genomes to unlock the secrets of aging, including through experiments involving naked mole rats.

The hiring of Feinberg indicates that the company wants to unify its many health initiatives covering AI-based web services, software, hardware and bets; a source said The Wall Street Journal Feinberg is expected to provide strategic direction, although it is not clear whether his role will encompass the experimental efforts of Alphabet.

[ad_2]
Source link