A timeline of key developments

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Google made several moves in 2021 to shake up and strengthen its healthcare presence, from renovating its healthcare unit to building a range of partnerships with hospitals and healthcare systems.

Here’s a timeline of the tech giant’s major healthcare moves in 2021. The developments are separated by three categories: leadership and strategy, partnerships with healthcare professionals, and healthcare projects.

Leadership and strategy

March 17: Google Health selects former Highmark CMO Charles DeShazer, MD, to serve as director of clinical products.

June 8: Google publishes a job posting for the Google Health Director Chief of Staff. The position is described as working with Google’s chief health officer to ensure operational and strategic success.

June 17: Google Health begins moving more than 130 of its 700 employees to other areas of the company, including Search and its newly acquired Fitbit group.

August 19: David Feinberg, MD, vice president of Google Health, announces plans to leave the company after three years to become CEO of Cerner, an EHR provider based in Kansas City, Mo.

August 19: Google says it is dissolving hundreds of employees from its healthcare division into existing divisions.

August 23: A Google spokesperson confirms to Becker’s that the teams under Dr. Feinberg’s leadership will continue with a new structure, as the Google Health name will continue to include all of Google’s work in the health and wellness field.

September 9: Karen DeSalvo, Google’s Chief Health Officer, MD, tells Bloomberg that Google’s new strategy is an effort to incorporate search and health initiatives into its core products, such as Google Search and YouTube, rather than launch new services. commercial.

September 21: The Wall Street Journal reports that Google plans to buy a New York City-based office building for $ 2.1 billion, a signal it intends to strengthen in-person work amid the embrace of other remote office firms .

October 26: Google appoints former Headspace executive Dr. Megan Jones as first clinical director of mental health and consumers.

Google Partnership with Healthcare Professionals

February 12: Google Cloud partners with the University of Minnesota to create an educational program for students pursuing careers in the healthcare industry. As part of the program, students are matched with a professional from Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who serves as a mentor and shares relevant career experiences and support with them.

February 18: The Star Tribune reports that Google is planning to open its first office in Minnesota as part of its ongoing healthcare partnership with Mayo Clinic.

February 23: Google and St. Louis-based Ascension continue the collaboration that began in 2018 by implementing a tool, dubbed Care Studio, to help physicians better organize and search for patient information.

March 2: Highmark Health builds on its technology partnership with Google Cloud by launching a six-year partnership with Verily. As part of the collaboration, Highmark will add Verily’s digital assistance tools for managing chronic conditions, including congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, to its Living Health model for patients and clinicians.

April 1: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston joins the pilot project of Google’s research tool EHR Care Studio.

April 27: Henry Ford Health System in Detroit collaborates with Google Cloud and Miracle Software Systems to launch an international competition to propose ideas for reducing health inequalities using technology.

May 18: Google partners with Chicago-based Northwestern Medicine to develop an artificial intelligence tool to support the work of doctors by triaging mammography patients.

May 26: HCA Healthcare, based in Nashville, Tenn., Signs a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud focused on building a health data analytics platform to support the healthcare system’s clinical and operational workflows. As part of the partnership, HCA will use Google Cloud health data offerings, including the Google Cloud Healthcare application programming interface and BigQuery.

September 1: Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health implements Google’s Workspace platform to improve patient-employee collaboration across its 140 hospitals.

October 18: Blue Shield of California and Google Cloud collaborate on a cloud-based solution that allows the insurer to process claims in real time.

October 20: Edison’s New Jersey-based Hackensack Meridian Health migrates its clinical and corporate operations to Google Workspace. As part of the collaboration, the healthcare system uses Google Cloud to protect its data while deploying artificial intelligence in clinical areas, including newborn screening, mammography screening, prostate cancer screening, sepsis detection and COVID-19 detection.

December 8: Google partners with the World Health Organization to create an open source development kit to empower healthcare professionals in low- and middle-income countries.

Google health projects

January 14: Google completes the $ 2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit, continuing efforts to improve its wearables division.

January 25: Google details its plans to provide more than $ 150 million to support COVID-19 vaccine education and distribution efforts and convert many of its offices into vaccination sites.

February 4: Google Fit announces that it will launch new features that allow users to measure heart rate and respiratory rate with the Pixel phone’s camera.

March 9: Google Cloud makes its new healthcare consent management application programming interface generally available to healthcare technology developers and clinical researchers working with patient healthcare data.

April 9: Google enters the early stages of a new project that aims to explore and develop a consumer-facing health documentation tool for Android users. Google is not collaborating directly with any health organization on the project, which could support the development of a medical record tool similar to Apple’s Health Records app, STAT reports.

April 15: Google pledges $ 250 million in advertising grants to government and public health agencies to fund 2.5 billion public service announcements related to vaccines. Google also said it will provide 250,000 COVID-19 vaccines to countries in need.

April 15: Google Cloud launches a call center with virtual agents to assist callers in 28 languages ​​to answer questions related to COVID-19 and share data with public health agencies.

July 14: Researchers from Google Health, Naval Medical Center San Diego and The Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine develop an AI model to predict breast cancer status and better understand cancers for treatment.

July 19: Google’s YouTube launches an initiative to combat health disinformation, which has three main objectives: to remove disinformation, reduce its dissemination, and promote credible sources of health information.

August 27: Google moves forward with plans to shut down Streams, a mobile app developed to help doctors track patients’ conditions, just two years after finalizing its acquisition.

October 17: Google announces that it will launch a mobile app for its Care Studio EHR tool.

December 3: Google announces that it will launch new features in its search engine that aim to help patients find doctors who are online with their insurance and reduce language barriers.

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