Building a Clinical Team in a Large Technology Company

Technical innovations over the past 20 years have changed the way we live many parts of our daily lives, but there is resounding agreement that progress in health care has not kept pace. While many believe that technology will improve health outcomes, there is a real and persistent concern that technology companies do not understand the complexity of health and health care. This challenge is usually discussed as an either/or problem. Either technology companies must disrupt the way that health care works, or they won’t succeed because they will never understand the real world of health and health care. The authors believe that there is a third way — one that establishes a robust, thriving clinical team within a major technology company that brings a deep understanding of the current health care system to bear and a passion to make real improvements. However, clinical teams represent new functions for technology companies, and so they also represent a cultural shift. This article summarizes several years of experience building Google’s clinical team, and later adapting it during Covid-19, to offer six lessons for organizations embarking on similar journeys.

• Health & Bioscience