Can the Google Healthcare Advisory Board catalyze change in healthcare?
With all the news and instant analysis of the Publicis/Omnicom merger last week, one meme of explanation keeps recurring: these agency networks believe they needed to merge because of the transformative impact on marketing of “Big Data” in general, and Google in particular.
As the Wall Street Journal put it on July 28th:
“Advertisers use data to better aim their ads at certain demographic groups, taking into account people’s Internet surfing behavior or purchasing habits. To do this efficiently requires access to huge amounts of data, where Google has a head start.”
“It’s trillions of data that we have to crunch down in order to go down to very small segments or clusters of the population to deliver some single messages to very small groups of individuals,” (Publicis CEO Maurice) Lévy said in an interview. “For that we need scale.”
So the timing was particularly interesting for me, as a member of the Google Healthcare Advisory Board (or G-HAB) to be sitting inside the whale, looking out at the healthcare industry during this era of upheaval.
The G-HAB consists of people like me and other alleged “thought leaders” from ad agencies, pharma, non-profits, and consultancies. People like Dr. Jordan Safirstein, an interventional cardiologist and prodigious healthcare blogger; Mark Bard, a founder of Manhattan Research and the Digital Health Coalition; Brian Fox, a Principal at McKinsey & Co, and a leader of their Healthcare, Consumer Products and Marketing & Sales practices, Sohini Chowdhury, SVP of Research Partnerships at the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and Rebecca Sroge, GM, Marketing Communications and Operations for AbbVie. Collectively, we have been asked to advise Google about the key issues facing the industry and what we might be able to accomplish collectively to create real-world solutions.
In our most recent meeting, a half dozen Googlers hosted about 15 of us outsiders for several hours of serious brainstorming inside Google’s gargantuan Manhattan headquarters. The session was moderated by Daniel Seewald, Director of Worldwide Innovation at Pfizer (talk about an intimidating title).
I’m not at liberty to reveal the exact topic and output of the conversation until the G-HAB has agreed to publish them. But what I found even more interesting than the precise details of our discussion was the overarching dynamic that shaped the conversation, and that reveals to me a fundamental assumption about the current state of “digital healthcare” and the marketing environment through which we are all frantically scurrying.
This undergirding assumption beneath both the Publicis/Omnicom merger and the potential for the G-HAB is that, to put it plainly, “bigger is better”. That perhaps the ‘problem’ we’ve all been having with healthcare marketing innovation in the digital age is that no one organization has the clout (in terms of reputation, presence and market influence) to “break through the logjams”, as one of the G-HAB members put it.
To illustrate the point: It was startling to see how quickly each of the three G-HAB brainstorming breakout teams independently turned to Google itself as the enabling solution to the challenge on the table.
Part of this is, no doubt, due to the “Google Aura” that seems to have enveloped the world over the last few years, displacing the “Cult of Apple”, now so clearly overripe and mushy. With Android, Google Glass, Google Now, and a seemingly endless stream of innovations emerging from the Googleplex, the company has become what Apple was: everyone’s favorite model of the way forward to breakthrough innovation.
In healthcare, we’ve all seen the case study of Google’s Flu Trend initiative (if you haven’t, the white paper is here: http://www.google.org/flutrends/about/how.html), wherein Google used aggregated search data to estimate flu activity worldwide in near real-time.
And we’ve all been ogling the possibilities of Google Glass in healthcare. In fact, if you google “Google Glass in healthcare”, you will get 12.6 million results. To save you time, I’ll point you to just one, from US News and World Report: http://bit.ly/16EXtfZ. (The other 12,599,999 results are similar; I checked.)
The power and relevance of the Google brand has a sort of magnetic appeal, bending (and perhaps distorting) normal patterns of thinking (at least, it surely seemed to during our brainstorming):
“Why don’t we use Google’s healthcare search data to see how we can persuade (a particular target audience) to participate in a (particular worthy initiative)?”
“We could replace (existing half-baked industry resource) with one created by Google that would be so much better and cooler!”
“Let’s add an ad to every healthcare search results page to get massive awareness for this issue overnight.”
Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that we were, basically, asking for Google to sacrifice a portion of its revenue at the altar of our industry’s self-interest; maybe it would actually make sense for Google to do one or more of these things for the even more dominant market position it might achieve (they did pretty well giving away Android software for free, didn’t they?). The more interesting observation for me was that we all were assuming that this could be the answer.
But let’s pause for a moment. Do you remember Google Health, the much-ballyhooed initiative Google undertook to solve the problem of the patient medical record once and for all? Launched in 2008, Google Health was consigned to the vault of comatose ambitions just three years later. According to Google’s own blog:
“In the end, while we weren’t able to create the impact we wanted with Google Health, we hope it has raised the visibility of the role of the empowered consumer in their own care. We continue to be strong believers in the role information plays in healthcare and in improving the way people manage their health…”
Apparently Google itself determined that, in healthcare at least, its size, brains and magic alone could not solve this gigantic problem. And I’m not picking on Google, Microsoft tried to fix the same problem at about the same time, with Microsoft HealthVault, and while it’s not been officially killed, the initiative seem at least deeply moribund at the moment.
None of which means that Google can’t play an immensely important role in helping to catalyze change in an industry notoriously slow to adapt to the new economy. But it’s not Google’s size alone that can be the answer to everything. Rather, the current initiatives being pursued with the G-HAB may represent a new modality for change: one in which Google can help enable transformation, without being solely responsible for reinventing the entire industry by itself.
To me, this is a much more promising path. Because while it’s true that Google can’t succeed on its own, it’s also true that the lack of an industry standard-setter has made it well-nigh impossible to create market momentum that can overcome barriers of inertia and, frankly, lack of courage and imagination in the industry. The results from earlier attempts to create such an agenda-setting body met with faint success. (PhRMA, that immensely ineffective lobbying group, I’m talking about you.)
So maybe, just maybe, by having industry team up with Google on the central questions that confront us, we can generate enough momentum to actually persuade/compel/shame the industry to take actions that are clearly in our mutual self-interest. And perhaps the imprimatur of Google (along with a not inconsiderable chunk of its soft dollars) can help ignite an eruption that will indeed break through a few significant logjams.
We shall see. But I did leave my first G-HAB meeting looking out at the healthcare landscape with a smidgen more hope that the changes we all know are needed may now be more possible than they were before. Not because of Google’s magic, name, or size alone, but because we may be formulating a catalytic concoction.
Stay tuned.