Google health chief David Feinberg: ‘global impact’ is goal

Google is going after the health sector in a major way, but Google’s health vice president said he’s feeling more pressure to bringits health products to Google-sized scale than to bring immediate revenue to the company.

David Feinberg, who joined Google in a newly-created role as VP of health two years ago, said several times Wednesday that he feels pressure to bring products to scale but that revenue isn’t a part of most of his discussions with Google higher-ups.

“The real pressure is ‘is this really going to help millions of people?’,” Feinberg said at the Wall Street Journal Health Tech virtual conference Wednesday. “Is it Google scale? That’s the pressure.”

However, there’s no doubt the company has a vested interest in healthcare across several business units. For instance, Google Cloud is partnering with HCA Healthcare, a healthcare provider based in Tennessee, to develop algorithms based on patient records in an attempt to improve efficiency and patient outcomes.

The company hired Obama administration official Karen DeSalvo to the company in 2019. She led the company’s Covid-19 efforts and recently announced the company is helping create a device that uses AI to detect skin conditions.

Feinberg, who helped with the exposure notification product with Apple for Covid-19, said the big product the company is focused on is Care Studio, its partnership with Ascension that aims to organize patients’ electronic records for healthcare practitioners.

Feinberg said it can scale…

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