Google Ventures, Mobile Healthcare Apps

Google Ventures has been sought out recently by pharma companies in efforts to help cure cancer. In addition to its financial investments, Google Ventures also contributes to workshops and design services for companies. The right leadership must be in place. The area is quite complex. Numerous stakeholders need to be involved in defining information required within the organization. Challenges still arise in the management's decision making. As urgent as the need is for healthcare to adapt, there are many areas that definitely have their work cut out for improvement. The venture group currently has $1.2 billion under management.

Mutual Mobile / Google

The JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco has been the host of biotechnology startups where digital technologies are upending the way healthcare is delivered. According to the WSJ, attendance at the conference has changed to reflect the new reality, as health-insurance companies, software developers, purveyors of big-data analytics and a range of other information technologies have begun to fill out the roster, on the presenters’ stages and in the nearby hotels where the deal-making happens. “I’ve been coming to this for five years,” said Krishna Yeshwant, a general partner at Google Ventures.

“The Affordable Care Act has led to this shift, and has created a business model that didn’t even really exist five years ago. There is all this talk now about analytics, about digital health, health-care delivery. I have [portfolio company CEOs doing information-technology] who ask me, ‘Should I be going to JP Morgan?,’ and I say ‘Yes, you have to be here.’ A few years ago I might have said no.”

Timing, meeting deadlines and precision will be important factors to that next wave for healthcare IT. The data sensibilities should scale alongside growth of big data. We can take what we learned from Obama's campaign when building systems that are adaptable, innovatively designed and able to meet deadline. Many companies today in biotech are thought of as now a 21st-century version of older pharma companies. There are pioneering organizations out there which have contributed to advances such as difficult-to-treat diseases.