Google’s Chief Health Officer Is Retiring

Google’s chief health officer, Dr. Karen DeSalvo, announced today that she will be retiring. Dr. DeSalvo’s career at the company has spanned nearly 6 years and has witnessed some of the most crucial and historical milestones in healthcare, both for the organization and society as a whole. Notably, she spearheaded the company’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, in addition to building out the larger framework for the approach to artificial intelligence and healthcare. Additionally, her tenure also oversaw significant expansion of the healthcare ecosystem across devices, YouTube, information sharing and the growth of industry partnerships.

Previously a celebrated public health leader and a practicing physician, Dr. DeSalvo started the role in 2019 with a noble goal: enable technology to make the delivery of medicine and clinical care better, in order to ultimately improve societal health outcomes.

Accordingly, under her leadership, Google’s healthcare function saw significant growth and expansion. During the pandemic, for example, Google and YouTube became one of the primary sources of information for billions of people worldwide. Over time, the portfolio has continued to rapidly expand; much of Dr. DeSalvo’s time at the company has been devoted to meeting industry leaders and operators on the ground to better understand pain-points and obstacles first-hand from communities and partners. Though Google has always invested significantly in data, this work was focused on using that data and information as a meaningful tool to help communities, organizations and patients stay informed and make decisions about their health.

The fact that technology companies have a healthcare practice and division seems somewhat routine now. After all, many other tech giants, including Amazon Health and Microsoft, have certainly made their intentions clear and have invested billions of dollars to establish their own sub-organizations dedicated to the field.

However, when Dr. DeSalvo started, this was not necessarily the norm; in fact, a technology company dedicating an entire ecosystem to something as complex and nuanced as healthcare was by no means ordinary. Rather, a team had to be built from the ground-up, and this process was uncharted territory. In fact, it was such a unique phenomenon that Google’s process in building this team was actually published in the New England Journal of Medicine and is frequently cited as foundational learning for companies that envision playing a part in the modern healthcare technology ecosystem.

Dr. DeSalvo says that one aspect she is most proud of during her time is the subtle yet crucial transition of the Google Health function being viewed as solely advisors to becoming true partners across the company: “We’re in a great place as a team and as a company to leverage the best in technology and information to help billions of people.” She also describes how proud she is of the immense work that has been done across the wider portfolio. A few examples include: the growth of Google Cloud, which has enabled scores of partners to better scale services for their patients; a robust ecosystem for medical content creation and information on YouTube, which has enabled an entirely new way of knowledge sharing and education; and most recently, the company’s aggressive push into generative AI, which has empowered an incredibly promising road ahead for the company.

An extremely crucial aspect of Google Health’s growth journey and success is chief clinical officer, Dr. Michael Howell, who will soon be taking over Dr. DeSalvo’s role. Dr. Howell, a critical care physician by training, started at the company as a principal scientist with Google Brain, and quickly transitioned to becoming a leader across the wider healthcare portfolio. His work has undisputedly been one of the key ingredients in Google Health’s success story.

Dr. Howell explains that during his time working with Dr. DeSalvo, he’s seen the clinical team expand significantly, both in terms of people and portfolio. However, the mission has always been consistent: “we know what good care should look like; we have spent so much time thinking and talking about what is the right model to build healthcare products that will actually help people.”

Congruent to this sentiment, Dr. DeSalvo comments—“he is the perfect person to step into this role. He is always thinking about the person at the other end of the technology and brings his lived experiences for the team and the products. That’s why Dr. Howell is a unicorn.”

Why is all of this important?

Because healthcare and technology have become remarkably intertwined over the past decade, and technology companies will undoubtedly redefine the course of the industry for decades to come. The people and leaders that undertake this momentous task matter.

Innovation has enabled individuals, health systems, organizations and devices to collect incredibly vast amounts of data. In fact, RBC Capital Markets reports that the healthcare industry generates nearly 30% of the world’s entire volume of data. And now, it is upto innovators to figure out how to use that data to actually move the needle on improving health outcomes. This is why, as mentioned above, technology giants across the board are investing billions of dollars in the sector and are dedicating entire divisions to work on healthcare’s hardest problems.

The intersection of healthcare and technology is just getting started, especially with so much potential with data interoperability, consumer wearables and generative AI, to name just a few modalities. The technology industry as whole, including Google/Alphabet’s work, has shown incredible promise in solving some of healthcare’s toughest challenges. It certainly will not be an easy road; after all, healthcare is not the most malleable industry to implement change in. However, there has undoubtedly been immense progress in a relatively short time.

For healthcare’s story, it is still very much the “early days,” and assuredly, there is still plenty of opportunity to create impact. Dr. DeSalvo enthusiastically shares this optimism: “we’re at a time of abundance. For decades, healthcare has always been painted as restrictive—not enough physicians, not enough staff, not enough resources. But now, with generative AI and technology as a whole, we can do so much with so little. I am excited and hopeful that this abundance will ultimately translate to better care and better health outcomes.”