Report: Google is winding down its healthcare division

Google LLC has reportedly decided to shutter its Google Health division, which was launched in 2018 to develop new technologies for the healthcare sector.

Business Insider reported the move today, citing an internal company memo. The memo is said to have been sent to employees on Thursday by Jeff Dean, the head of the search giant’s research organization, of which the Google Health division was part.

The executive wrote to employees that the staffers who worked at the division will move to other parts of the company. A Google Health team that developed software to help doctors search patient records will from now on report directly to Dean. Another team, which was exploring ways of applying machine learning to tasks such as processing medical images, will become part of the group headed by Yossi Matias, Google’s vice president of search and AI.

Google Health head David Feinberg, who had led the division since its launch in 2018, is joining publicly traded healthcare technology firm Cerner Inc. as its new chief executive.

The healthcare sector can be expected to continue being a major focus for Google despite the move to shutter Google Health. The search giant earlier this year completed its $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit Inc., a maker of smartwatches with health tracking features. Fitbit’s smartwatches are mainly marketed to consumers, but the devices are also used by healthcare providers as part of patient care programs and by researchers to support clinical trials.

Healthcare will no doubt remain a major focus for Google’s cloud business as well. Google Cloud over the last few years has assembled an extensive collection of solutions designed to help organizations such as hospitals process medical data more efficiently. The latest addition is the Healthcare Data Engine, a service that organizes medical information to make it easier to analyze and thus help researchers more quickly find insights such as ways to optimize clinical trials.

Google parent Alphabet Inc. has two units focused specifically on the healthcare sector that will continue to operate following the shuttering of Google Health. They are the company’s Calico and Verily life sciences subsidiaries. Verily is the largest of the two subsidiaries, having raised more than $2 billion in funding from Alphabet and external investors. 

“Google deeply believes in the power of technology to improve health and wellness and we have increased our health investments across the company,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement following today’s report. “This has included developing projects within Google Health, launching and expanding health-related features on Search, Maps and YouTube that reach billions of people, and welcoming Fitbit.”

Photo: Google