Google Co-Founders To Healthcare: We"re Just Not That Into You

At his yearly CEO summit, noted VC Vinod Khosla spoke with Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Web page (file below “King, Great To Be The”).

In direction of the end of a wide-ranging conversation that encompassed driverless vehicles, flying wind turbines, and large-altitude balloons providing world wide web access, Khosla started to ask about well being.

Exclusively, Khosla wondered whether they could “imagine Google turning out to be a wellness organization? Possibly a larger organization than the search enterprise or the media enterprise?”

Their response, remarkably, was fundamentally, “no.”  While glucose-sensing contact lenses may well be “very awesome,” in the phrases of Larry Page, Brin notes that,

“Generally, wellness is just so heavily regulated. It is just a painful company to be in. It is just not always how I want to spend my time. Even although we do have some overall health tasks, and we’ll be undertaking that to a specific extent. But I consider the regulatory burden in the U.S. is so higher that think it would dissuade a great deal of entrepreneurs.”

Adds Page,

“We have Calico, naturally, we did that with Artwork Levinson, which is pretty independent work. Focuses on well being and longevity. I’m actually thrilled about that. I am genuinely fired up about the likelihood of data also, to boost health. But that’s– I feel what Sergey’s saying, it’s so heavily regulated. It is a challenging spot. I can give you an example. Picture you had the capability to search people’s healthcare records in the U.S.. Any healthcare researcher can do it. Maybe they have the names eliminated. Perhaps when the health care researcher searches your data, you get to see which researcher searched it and why. I envision that would save ten,000 lives in the 1st yr. Just that. That is practically unattainable to do since of HIPPA. I do fret that we regulate ourselves out of some truly great possibilities that are undoubtedly on the information-mining end.”

Khosla then asked a question about a use situation involving one particular of my favored portfolio business of his, Ginger.io, connected to the monitoring of a patient’s psychiatric state.

Responded Web page, “I was speaking to them about that final night. It was awesome.”

That quite a lot captures Brin and Page’s view of healthcare – exciting to perform on a couple of “cool” projects, but beyond that, the regulatory issues are just too wonderful to warrant severe investment.

(To be clear, Brin and Page emphasized their individual distance from Google Ventures, which has conspicuously pursued a assortment of well being-associated investments.  “Medicine demands to come out of the dark ages,” Google Ventures Managing Partner Bill Maris lately advised Re/Code.)

On the face of it, it’s pretty amazing that a business that does not feel twice about tackling absurdly difficult scientific tasks (eg driverless vehicles) is brought to its knees by the prospect of dealing with the byzantine regulation all around healthcare (and much more normally, our “calcified hairball” program of care, as VC Esther Dyson has place it).  A equivalent sentiment has been expressed by VC and Uber-investor Bill Gurley as well evidently taking on taxi and limousine commissions is more palatable than taking on the healthcare establishment.

Yet other people – with eyes broad open – are taking on the challenge.  AthenaHealth’s Jonathan Bush, for instance, is maddened by the challenges of regulatory capture (see my WSJ assessment of his guide right here), however he demonstrates up every day to fight the battle.

Similarly, while I’ve not often agreed with Khosla’s point of view on algorithims, I’ve consistently admired his willingness to enter the fray (see right here and here).

This morning on Twitter, he asked whether his willingness to invest in healthcare implies he’s courageous (as I advised) or naïve.

The solution, I imagine, is most likely each.  The problems in healthcare, specially relating to regulation, are real, and disruption is hard to come by.  As Brown University Emergency Doctor Megan Ranney remarks, there are “big hazards, lots of roadblocks” but also “huge possible for humankind.”

I suspect the important to overcoming the regulatory roadblocks will be creating the use situations far more persuasive and quick.  Right after all, most folks have the enlightened self-interest to embrace daily life-conserving innovations (anti-vaxers notwithstanding).

The challenge is that to this stage, the benefits of technological innovation usually seem to be significantly less than persuasive – the tech would seem “cool,” as Web page and Brin may possibly say, but not exactly convincing.  I’m not just talking about Google Glass (which possibly defines the genre) and Google’s get in touch with lenses (I’ve not met many authorities who’ve bought into this technology), but also approaches like 23andMe.  When they ran up against regulators, there wasn’t precisely an outcry, “this technology has transformed my existence and now you are shutting it down.”  If only.

In contrast, efforts to shut down Uber generally make far a lot more impassioned protests.  Why? Due to the fact it’s quickly obvious to customers how Uber improves their lives.  To use the support after is to be convinced.

What healthcare technology needs is to uncover a way to be similarly indispensable.  Webpage may cite the possible to save ten,000 lives, but the challenge is to persuade anybody this applies to their own N of 1.  A lot more directed examples of circumstances in which technological innovation could quickly affect lives, and could affect more had been it not for oppressive regulation, would go a extended way to rolling back the rules that appear to impede progress.

Google Co-Founders To Healthcare: We"re Just Not That Into You