[HN Gopher] Google is dismantling its health division
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Google is dismantling its health division
Author : ra7
Score : 124 points
Date : 2021-08-20 18:22 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| prepend wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| sankumsek wrote:
| 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.
| randycupertino wrote:
| Does this include Verily, which is part of Alphabet? They just
| got funding last year: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/yea-
| verily-google-s-he...
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Verily is not part of Google, so I'd think it's not part of
| Google Health either by definition.
| duffpkg wrote:
| 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.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| IME, this phenomenon is not limited to healthcare.
| lvspiff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm so glad UNH never partnered with Google. I would have
| been planning an exit strategy for all my stocks ASAP.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Sounds like the projects will continue under different parts of
| the company?
| dhosek wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| charles_f wrote:
| 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-
| tracki... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-
| sells-future-p... [3]
| https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/chrome-69-keeps...
| [4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/techs-dirty-secret-the-app-
| deve...
| gundmc wrote:
| 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?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >I'm not exactly sure what the biggest reason for that is
|
| I suspect healthcare in the US (and probably elsewhere) has to
| deal with a lot of liability, and so processes that fly in
| other situations do not fare well in healthcare. Everything i
| has to be dotted and every t crossed to make sure you do not
| end up with any part of the culpability for an adverse
| healthcare outcome, as well as liabilities from laws such has
| HIPAA.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| Apple is dismantling an internal project for tracking employee
| health that was likely an incubator for future health projects.
|
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/08/19/apple-health-divi...
|
| If Apple and Google are both ditching health projects
| simultaneously, I wonder if that suggests that they have
| advance warning of some change to the regulatory climate.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| No, they probably just aren't making headway against the
| established players like Epic
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| These are questions that are worth delving into more deeply. In
| my brief period at IBM I was adjacent to the Watson Health
| folks and the challenge, to my unsophisticated eye, was greed.
| Basically the "Health Care System" in the US appears to be
| completely corrupt[1]. Thus any proposed change the is
| presented based on how it will "Improve the system" is
| immediately suspect by those for whom the unimproved system is
| paying them a hefty paycheck. In the two (and be aware there
| were thousands so this is an anecodtal sized sample set)
| engagements I had visibility into with Watson Health teams, the
| one that went in with "This will improve patient outcomes" got
| shut out, and the one that went in with "This will increase
| your net margins" was welcomed with open arms.
|
| I'm not sure how one unties that particular knot.
|
| [1] Corruption here being that the primary mission is the
| collection of monies and health outcomes are a tolerated side
| effect of that.
| deadmutex wrote:
| > Thus any proposed change the is presented based on how it
| will "Improve the system" is immediately suspect by those for
| whom the unimproved system is paying them a hefty paycheck
|
| Sadly, my observation is that this is the rule (and not the
| exception) in many industries.
| pphysch wrote:
| In my view it's not a problem specific to any industry or
| domain, but a fundamental problem of social organizations:
| the clash between individual (employee) interests and
| organization interests.
| rlewkov wrote:
| When I tell my wife about something like this conversation
| goes something like ... Wife: Why would they do something
| like that Me: You know why Wife (sheepishly): Money Me:
| ding, ding, ding
| jnwatson wrote:
| "It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult
| to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to
| manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity
| of all who would profit by the preservation of the old
| institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain
| by the new ones."
|
| From _The Prince_ by Machiavelli
| leovander wrote:
| Money and all of the above.
| outside1234 wrote:
| All of them - plus long long long timeframes to get anything
| done.
| gopher_space wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is that obstacle removed in countries with national
| healthcare programs of some sort?
| kirykl wrote:
| It's that Insurance (private or gov) is always going to cap the
| market. Opportunity cost is too great when returns elsewhere is
| uncapped
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| tlogan wrote:
| I think the problem is that we try to simplify healthcare -
| like it is vertical. Healthcare is more like world on it own.
| The only way get into "healthcare world" is to attack a very
| specific niche but the niche is too small for big companies. So
| the companies decide to "boil the ocean" - which always fails.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 0x0nyandesu wrote:
| Bingo. This is it. Every Google employee thinks they are hot
| shit even when they get nothing done.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| 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
| mrRandomGuy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| To be fair, deprecating that is a good idea. They botched
| the execution.
| amsheehan wrote:
| I don't think I'm breaking any NDAs by saying that that is
| just entirely not what happens.
| nickff wrote:
| > _" 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Apparently the "P" in your middle name stands for "non-
| standard Pedigree"?
| analyst74 wrote:
| I think their elite school preference is only for new
| grads, the experienced pipeline has always been open to
| people with less pedigree.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| 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.
| mulmen wrote:
| 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.
| wmf wrote:
| 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.
| caslon wrote:
| 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]
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| In exchange, we'll give each of you a 90 day free Stadia
| subscription!
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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/th
| e-t...
| ethbr0 wrote:
| 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
| philipkglass wrote:
| The universities did get the scans. They're in the
| HathiTrust project. The public gets access to scans of out-
| of-copyright works. University faculty, students, and other
| researchers can get access to in-copyright works too.
|
| For the general public HathiTrust is like Google Books with
| worse search and worse UI but more books readable in full.
| Sometimes I search Books and then go over to HathiTrust
| when I find that Books has unreasonably restricted viewing
| of some search hits.
| spideymans wrote:
| 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.
| dheera wrote:
| 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]
| vntok wrote:
| 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?
| happiness_idx wrote:
| Do I read the article by paying for it?
| oenetan wrote:
| https://archive.ph/sycgo
| motohagiography wrote:
| 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.
| charles_f wrote:
| Good insights, thanks for sharing!
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > "healthcare is the Afghanistan of tech where giant empires go
| in thinking they can solve it and leave beaten years later
| wondering what happened."
|
| Great metaphor. It's kinda like Education: if you come in
| thinking you're going to make money, all the existing players
| say "Hello, sailor!"
|
| I joined Google in 2005. Even then, executives who were out of
| favor were sent to the "health care division" which was
| commonly understood as the one-way door out of Google.
| bsder wrote:
| > It's kinda like Education: if you come in thinking you're
| going to make money
|
| Your statement can stop there.
|
| There isn't some huge amount of money sloshing around in
| education when contrasted to healthcare.
|
| In education, you're fighting over pennies. If you want money
| in education, you have to target the "tutoring" level which
| is boutique and caters to those with extra money.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| It's a shame that these games have to be played.
| duffpkg wrote:
| This is a very salient comment. I wrote "Hacking Healthcare"
| and created ClearHealth/HealthCloud. If you are in any way
| looking for opportunities I'd love to chat with you.
|
| du@50km.com
| zucked wrote:
| This doesn't make any sense to my terminal. I _think_ your
| domain is supposed to be 50km, but my terminal thinks its
| ku.cou.
| legerdemain wrote:
| That's because the poster probably thought that `tr` works
| like `sed`, replacing the string "spam" with the string
| "du" to produce their email address, du@50km.com.
|
| That's not what `tr` does. It replaces each letter S-P-A-M
| with the letter in the same position in the string D-U.
| Because "du" is shorter than "spam," `tr` just reuses U for
| letters 3 and 4. So the mapping is S->D, P->U, A->U, M->U,
| making "spam@50km.com" into "duuu@50ku.cou," and the -s
| flag then compresses multiple repeated U's into one.
|
| Lesson: don't be too clever.
| prepend wrote:
| > Lesson: don't be too clever.
|
| A few other lessons from this: 1) test your scripts, 2)
| be clever enough, 3) email obfuscation stopped working in
| 2000 for preventing spam, 4) handle spam at your receipt
| fortylove wrote:
| This comment is peak HN, and I love it.
| [deleted]
| Retric wrote:
| Having worked on the government side of healthcare I can say
| all these systems support interoperability _when money is on
| the line._ That's what tech giants don't understand, every
| system is trying to create their own ecosystem and fighting
| each other in the process. The only way it works is when
| mandates have actual teeth, otherwise it's its exactly as
| dysfunctional as intended.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| > all these systems support interoperability when money is on
| the line
|
| Can confirm, worked at an EHR vendor, and we didn't see
| enhancements to our aging interfaces until Meaningful Use
| measures came into play.
| adolph wrote:
| Feinberg to Cerner is mildly interesting since Geisinger is an
| Epic customer.
| ur-whale wrote:
| https://archive.ph/sycgo
| oenetan wrote:
| thanks
| kixiQu wrote:
| Who could have seen this coming?
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