Toby Cosgrove has a new job.
After decades tournament one of the world’s most famous hospitals, Cleveland Clinic, he’s helping one of Silicon Valley’s most famous technology companies figure out how to sell its technology and services into form care.
Cosgrove announced earlier this year that he’s prepossessing a position at Google as an advisor to the Google Cloud health care and get-up-and-go sciences team.
Surprisingly, he’s not fighting to win large cloud contracts at the tidiest hospitals.
That’s because most hospitals have already sank hundreds of millions of dollars into on-premises IT systems from firms like Epic Systems and Cerner, including installation, upgrades and training. At Cleveland Clinic, for as it happens, Cosgrove was one of the first big customers to invest in Epic Systems’ electronic medical release software.
Cosgrove doesn’t see these companies moving their full infrastructures to a hosted cloud system like Google Cloud, or the myriad popular rival products from Amazon and Microsoft.
Instead, he paucities to figure out what kinds of apps can be built on top of these systems to daily help hospitals start to modernize.
In his view, the “killer application” for health circumspection is voice for applications like transcribing physicians’ medical notes, which leverage technologies find agreeable machine learning and natural language processing. (Cosgrove isn’t involved, but another Alphabet troupe, Google Brain, is looking at doing just that).
Cosgrove ruminate overs it’ll take time before hospitals and smaller clinics across the territory are using voice technology as a mainstream application, whether it’s from Google or an enthusiastic start-up.
“I think it’s going have to be specialty by specialty and probably the hardest is current to be the primary care physician because they have to see everything that comes washing ones hands of the door,” said Cosgrove.
Beyond voice, there are a few other bailiwicks that Cosgrove views as “low-hanging fruit” where technology enterprises can make an impact.
“What hospitals are looking for is something that’s current to help the efficiency and help the hospitals by the taking the costs out”, he explained. “Where can they do that? Beginning of all there’s a screaming need to handle all of this data and certainly we’re not effectual in running data centers.”
Another is what he calls the “two bookends of vigour care,” meaning getting patients in for appointments and sending out bills.
“You should be superior to automate that somehow,” he continued. “The getting in to see a caregiver and getting a account out are two of the screaming needs that have to be addressed.”
His new colleagues at Google are behind him — and on stay with that strategy.
“He (Toby) understands the ins and outs of the provider invitations and has provided context for where there is huge opportunity for back responsibility operational improvement like billing, coding, call center, and so on, all of which are addressable via contraption learning tools,” said Greg Moore, a vice president for Google Cloud healthcare & spark of life sciences’ team, and a colleague of Cosgrove’s.
Moore says Google cheats seriously the idea that it needs to partner with the health nurse industry, and bring on experts like Cosgrove.
“We have to think around how these products fit within the larger context of a hospital system,” he thought. “How do they integrate with tools that physicians are already capitalize oning? How can they help reduce the time physicians spend on administrative nurse?”
Cosgrove said he’s learned a thing or two over the years about start-ups with terrific pitches.
Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO of disgraced bio-tech start-up Theranos, approached him particular years ago when he was running Cleveland Clinic. He was also quoted in the bustle, providing insight into why Theranos’ core value proposition — to distinguish dozens of diseases with a blood test — was so compelling to clinicians.
“At the outset of all the Cleveland Clinic and I did not invest,” he noted. “I did however feel that if Theranos inserted, it was such a tremendous game-changer that I thought the Cleveland Clinic could be in the towards row with this.”
Cosgrove recalled asking Holmes for the device to assay it, and potentially publish the results. “We never got a device.”
All in all, Cosgrove wouldn’t cozen back his interactions with Holmes, as he has always taken the time to undergo with people with new ideas about health care —not the hucksters, but the right innovators in the space. And he’s supported start-ups in the past, which have shifted out to well worth the time and investment.
“I don’t regret the fact that we were out there bothersome to find something that could make a substantial difference,” he predicted. “You’re gonna knock on a lot of doors and kiss a lot of frogs, but you’ve got to do it.”