{"id":2283,"date":"2014-07-08T10:32:07","date_gmt":"2014-07-08T00:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/?p=2283"},"modified":"2014-07-08T10:32:07","modified_gmt":"2014-07-08T00:32:07","slug":"google-founders-on-their-distaste-for-health-data-regulators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/?p=2283","title":{"rendered":"Google founders on their distaste for health data regulators"},"content":{"rendered":"

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http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/davidshaywitz\/2014\/07\/04\/google-co-founders-to-healthcare-were-just-not-that-into-you\/<\/p>\n

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David Shaywitz<\/a>Contributor<\/span><\/p>\n

I write about entrepreneurial innovation in medicine.<\/p>\n

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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PHARMA & HEALTHCARE<\/a>\u00a0

Google Co-Founders To Healthcare: We’re Just Not That Into You<\/h1>\n<\/hgroup>\n
Comment Now<\/a><\/div>\n
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At his yearly CEO summit, noted VC\u00a0Vinod Khosla<\/a>\u00a0spoke<\/a>\u00a0with Google co-foundersSergey Brin<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Larry Page<\/a>\u00a0(file under \u201cKing, Good To Be The\u201d).<\/p>\n

Towards the end of a wide-ranging conversation that encompassed driverless cars, flying wind turbines, and high-altitude balloons providing internet access, Khosla began to ask about health.<\/p>\n

Specifically, Khosla wondered whether they could \u201cimagine Google becoming a health company? Maybe a larger business than the search business or the media business?\u201d<\/p>\n

Their response, surprisingly, was basically, \u201cno.\u201d\u00a0 While glucose-sensing contact lenses might be \u201cvery cool,\u201d in the words of Larry Page, Brin notes that,<\/p>\n

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\u201cGenerally, health is just so heavily regulated. It\u2019s just a painful business to be in. It\u2019s just not necessarily how I want to spend my time. Even though we do have some health projects, and we\u2019ll be doing that to a certain extent. But I think the regulatory burden in the U.S. is so high that think it would dissuade a lot of entrepreneurs.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Adds Page,<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe have\u00a0Calico<\/a>, obviously, we did that with Art Levinson, which is pretty independent effort. Focuses on health and longevity. I\u2019m really excited about that. I am really excited about the possibility of data also, to improve health. But that\u2019s\u2013 I think what Sergey\u2019s saying, it\u2019s so heavily regulated. It\u2019s a difficult area. I can give you an example. Imagine you had the ability to search people\u2019s medical records in the U.S.. Any medical researcher can do it. Maybe they have the names removed. Maybe when the medical researcher searches your data, you get to see which researcher searched it and why. I imagine that would save 10,000 lives in the first year. Just that. That\u2019s almost impossible to do because of HIPAA. I do worry that we regulate ourselves out of some really great possibilities that are certainly on the data-mining end.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Khosla then asked a question about a use case involving one of my favorite portfolio companies of his, Ginger.io, related to the monitoring of a patient\u2019s psychiatric state.<\/p>\n

Responded Page, \u201cI was talking to them about that last night. It was cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

That pretty much captures Brin and Page\u2019s view of healthcare \u2013 fun to work on a few \u201ccool\u201d projects, but beyond that, the regulatory challenges are just too great to warrant serious investment.<\/p>\n

(To be clear, Brin and Page emphasized their personal distance from Google Ventures, which has conspicuously pursued a range of health-related investments.\u00a0 \u201cMedicine needs to come out of the dark ages,\u201d Google Ventures Managing Partner Bill Maris recently\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0Re\/code.)<\/p>\n

On the face of it, it\u2019s pretty amazing that a company that doesn\u2019t think twice about tackling absurdly challenging scientific projects (eg driverless cars) is brought to its knees by the prospect of dealing with the byzantine regulation around healthcare (and more generally, our \u201ccalcified hairball\u201d system of care, as VC Esther Dyson has\u00a0put it<\/a>).\u00a0 A similar sentiment has been\u00a0expressed<\/a>\u00a0by VC and Uber-investor Bill Gurley as well; evidently taking on taxi and limousine commissions is more palatable than taking on the healthcare establishment.<\/p>\n

Yet others \u2013 with eyes wide open \u2013 are taking on the challenge.\u00a0 AthenaHealth\u2019s Jonathan Bush, for instance, is maddened by the challenges of regulatory capture (see my WSJ review of his book\u00a0here<\/a>), yet he shows up each day to fight the battle.<\/p>\n

Similarly, while I\u2019ve not always agreed with Khosla\u2019s perspective on algorithims, I\u2019ve consistently admired his willingness to enter the fray (see\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

This morning on Twitter, he\u00a0asked<\/a>\u00a0whether his willingness to invest in healthcare means he\u2019s courageous (as I suggested) or na\u00efve.<\/p>\n

The answer, I imagine, is probably both.\u00a0 The challenges in healthcare, especially regarding regulation, are real, and disruption is hard to come by.\u00a0 As Brown University\u00a0emergency physician Megan Ranney\u00a0comments<\/a>, there are \u201cbig risks, lots of roadblocks\u201d but also \u201chuge potential for humankind.\u201d<\/p>\n

I suspect the key to overcoming the regulatory roadblocks will be making the use cases more persuasive and immediate.\u00a0 After all, most people have the enlightened self-interest to embrace life-saving innovations (anti-vaxers notwithstanding).<\/p>\n

The challenge is that to this point, the benefits of technology generally seem less than persuasive \u2013 the tech seems \u201ccool,\u201d as Page and Brin might say, but not exactly convincing.\u00a0 I\u2019m not just talking about Google Glass (which perhaps defines the genre) and Google\u2019s contact lenses (I\u2019ve not met many experts who\u2019ve bought into this technology), but also approaches like 23andMe.\u00a0 When they ran up against regulators, there wasn\u2019t exactly an outcry, \u201cthis technology has transformed my life and now you\u2019re shutting it down.\u201d\u00a0 If only.<\/p>\n

In contrast, efforts to shut down Uber typically generate far more impassioned protests.\u00a0 Why? Because it\u2019s immediately apparent to users how Uber improves their lives.\u00a0 To use the service once is to be convinced.<\/p>\n

What healthcare technology needs is to find a way to be similarly indispensable.\u00a0 Page may cite the potential to save 10,000 lives, but the challenge is to convince anyone this applies to their own N of 1.\u00a0 More directed examples of instances where technology could immediately impact lives, and could impact more were it not for oppressive regulation, would go a long way to rolling back the regulations that seem to impede progress.<\/p>\n

Rather than focusing on the thousands of lives that could be saved in an imagined future, technologists would do well to provide a compelling demonstration of what big data and sophisticated analytics can achieve for the health of discrete individuals in the present, even with current limitations; success here could help innovative entrepreneurs push back on antiquated regulations, and bring healthcare delivery into the modern age while ushering in a new era in biomedical research driven by access to rich coherent datasets.<\/p>\n

The truth is, Page is probably right about the underlying opportunity.\u00a0 In particular, as I\u2019ve long-argued<\/a>, there\u2019s tremendous potential to be found by thoughtfully combining comprehensive genomic and rich phenotypic data \u2013 immediate opportunities to impact clinical care, and the chance for a longer-term impact on scientific understanding.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m perhaps more optimistic than Page is, however, both about our collective ability to succeed meaningfully even within the constraints of our existing system, and about the ability of demonstrated success to move even the most intransigent stakeholders.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/davidshaywitz\/2014\/07\/04\/google-co-founders-to-healthcare-were-just-not-that-into-you\/ David ShaywitzContributor I write about entrepreneurial innovation in medicine. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. PHARMA & HEALTHCARE\u00a07\/04\/2014 @ 8:15PM\u00a017,430 views Google Co-Founders To Healthcare: We’re Just Not That Into You Comment Now At his yearly CEO summit, noted VC\u00a0Vinod Khosla\u00a0spoke\u00a0with Google co-foundersSergey Brin\u00a0and\u00a0Larry Page\u00a0(file under \u201cKing, Good To Be The\u201d). … Continue reading Google founders on their distaste for health data regulators<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8,9,10,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-data-saving-lives","category-entrepreneurship","category-healthcare","category-healthy-habits","category-power-aphorisms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2283"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2284,"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283\/revisions\/2284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}