Google has made no secret of its overarching ambition to organise the world's information and make it accessible to anyone.
And the healthcare industry has no shortage of such information, in any number of repositories and diverse formats, from MRI images to patient notes and data gathered from wearable devices.
Google has long sought to diversify its revenues streams away from search and advertising, the business it was founded on and which continues to make up the bulk of its revenue nearly 20 years later. So could health be the industry that helps the company to achieve that aim?
Like Apple, Google has made a play for the lowest-hanging health fruit, the consumer market. Its first attempt to enter the market was with Google Health in 2008, a project that was meant to let individuals gather their personal health data and medical records inside a single Google store.
It was shuttered at the end of 2011, after failing to gain any significant takeup. Three years later, it announced Google Fit, its equivalent to Apple's HealthKit, which was launched around the same time. Like HealthKit, Google Fit is a platform for developers to build apps on -- apps that allow users to track their exercise or wellness data through an Android phone or tablet, or a Google Wear wearable. Google doesn't release user numbers for Fit, so it's impossible to say if it's proving more successful than Health.
Elsewhere, Google has a handful of other products designed for professionals working in the life sciences ad and healthcare industries: cloud services that allow genomics researchers to store, process, and share big data sets, for example, or a HIPAA-compliant version of its G suite for use in healthcare organisations.While these are versions of its standard-issue cloud software given a different skin for the health industry, its most interesting work in healthcare involves products that have yet to see the light of day -- and could be revolutionary when they do
Looking to the future
Google is making its biggest bets in healthcare through three separate units: DeepMind, Verily, and Calico. The two first two businesses are both building software and technology aimed at healthcare providers, the latter is ostensibly trying to defeat death using bioetch.
Of the three, DeepMind is perhaps doing the most familiar work. DeepMind, an AI startup founded in the English city of Cambridge in 2010, was bought by Google four years later. While DeepMind is not exclusively a healthcare company, its products with the clearest path to commercialisation are focused on the industry.
Its best-known healthcare product is Streams, an app designed to decrease the incidence of acute kidney injury before it occurs by alerting clinicians to the warning signs that indicate a patient is a candidate for such an injury. The app itself doesn't contain any AI at present -- think of it as more simple analytics software for healthcare -- it's likely that such elements will make their way into the products in future. The system is being trialled with the Royal Free hospital, and may be extended to other conditions where picking up the right signs early on can prevent a full-blown life-threatening condition, such as sepsis, taking hold.
Other partnerships with UK healthcare organisations show the direction of travel for DeepMind's products. For example, in pilots with the Moorfields Eye Hospital and University College London Hospital, DeepMind is testing whether its products can analyse medical scans more quickly than doctors can, cutting down the delays in preparing a patient for surgery or another procedure. If the pilots prove successful, DeepMind can sell the software as a means of cutting down doctors' busywork, so they can get on with seeing and treating patients - that is, the all-important stuff that technology can't do (yet). Few hospitals would be able to resist the lure of a system that can automate mundane tasks so clinicians can get on with work that requires the human touch.
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