Chandra and others familiar with the healthcare and data industries expect Alphabet to develop products related to healthcare data and analytics, building on the company's data-processing prowess.
"One of Google's core strengths is the management and analysis of big data," said Morris Panner, CEO of Ambra Health, which has partnered with Google Cloud for its medical imaging tools. "They would really like to aggregate data and potentially provide deep workflow insights."
To make some of that data management specifically for healthcare, Alphabet has been bringing hospital and health system executives to Silicon Valley.
Last week, for instance, Alphabet hired former Cleveland Clinic CEO Dr. Toby Cosgrove as executive adviser to the Google Cloud healthcare and life sciences team. As adviser, Cosgrove and the Google Cloud team will look into using new technology while also improving the patient and provider user experience. They might do that with the Cloud Healthcare application programming interface, which users can use to pull healthcare data from various sources and analyze those data in the cloud.
"Dr. Cosgrove is a signal to the market and a credibility play as much as anything," said Jeff Gourdji, partner and healthcare industry practice lead at marketing consultancy Prophet.
Cosgrove is just the latest healthcare executive to make the move to Alphabet. Dr. Michael Howell, former director of the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science and Innovation at UChicago Medicine, is now Google Research's chief clinical strategist. And Dr. Vivian Lee, former CEO of University of Utah Health Care, is president of health platforms for Alphabet's Verily Life Sciences.
"When you look at who they're hiring, it's a sign that a lot of what they're building now is a big push to go from R&D to implementation, where they can make a real impact," said Bob Fuller, managing partner with the consulting firm Clarity Insights.
Alphabet will achieve some of those effects by partnering with healthcare organizations. The National Institutes of Health is partnering with Google Cloud for its Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability, or Strides, initiative in the hopes of decreasing barriers to using large amounts of biometric data for biomedicine. Through the partnership, announced in July 2018, the NIH will give its own researchers and academic researchers a framework for using Google Cloud storage and computing tools.
In the private sector, Google and Fitbit are partnering to bring patient-generated data and clinical data together in electronic health records.
"Because healthcare is so fragmented and there is such a large number of players, it lends itself better to partnerships versus other industry sectors," Chandra said.
Those partnerships might even extend to large, traditional healthcare software vendors, like Epic and Cerner. Google might start to push the FHIR standard, for instance, boosting interoperability and encouraging these other companies to be more open, Fuller said.
"The traditional healthcare companies need to be able to be open and to make sure that their solutions integrate well," he said.
That might extend not only to healthcare software vendors but to health insurance companies as well. Some expect Alphabet to make a play in the space, as it has signaled with a job posting for a health plan executive as well as with investments in Oscar, Clover and Collective Health.
"All the value potential for health insurance companies is in care management," Gourdji said, which depends on data.
But "they're terrible at data," he said. "The opportunity is for health insurance companies to partner with Google and give up a little of their own economic surplus, or Google can smash them and take a whole lot of value out of the value chain."
As with its other work, insurance data management and analysis would depend heavily on the cloud. With an intense focus on the cloud, Google may force the kind of change the healthcare industry has been slow to make: toward the cloud.
"If you're not innovating right now and you're counting on a traditional method that would be a strategic mistake," Panner said.
It will force the change alongside other companies pushing for the same—namely, Microsoft and Amazon.
"Long term, that's going to be extremely beneficial to the overall ecosystem," Panner said. "It bodes really well, because you now have an ecosystem with a lot of capital and access."
