MALE SPEAKER: Those of you were here before have heard
this extraordinary woman give a presentation.
She is a master of the high order bit, and she's coming to
give one again.
She spoke about speed.
She's probably perfect to speak about speed, because
she's one of the fast talkers I've ever met.
But actually, this time, Marissa Mayer, from Google,
who oversees a very, very broad swath of products at
Google, is going to speak about one that she's excited
about, and that she oversees now, called Google Health.
So please, I'm assuming, there you are, Marissa.
Welcome, Marissa Mayer.
MARISSA MAYER: Hi.
So I'm here today to talk about Google and health.
And there's been a lot of speculation around what we
might do in health, and what kinds of implications it have.
So I thought it may be appropriate to start with a
top 10 list. So the top ten things that you might see from
Google Health.
So number 10.
Related searches.
People with all of your problems also searched for--
Number nine.
Competition in the social networking space could lead to
a radical string of Health/Orkut mashups.
Rashbook, Boilbook, and Wartbook Number eight.
Google's cookie expiration is now based on your expected
expiration date.
Number seven.
Google's algorithms will be redeployed to
predict balding patterns.
And number six.
Then we'll sell you Rogaine.
Number five.
Google Paternity Search.
Number four.
Typing in symptoms may return, did you mean estate planning?
Number three.
This one might be my favorite, an I'm Feeling Yucky button.
We'll be able to deliver Viagra spam to only those
Gmail users who truly need it.
And your Google calendar may mysteriously end
on April 21, 2044.
So in all seriousness, obviously these aren't the
types of things that we're going to be doing with health.
But we do have a broad interest in this area.
And I need point out first that Google's not a doctor,
but people come to us with a lot of
health information needs.
People search on Google for health
information all the time.
They search for symptoms. We've seen multiple cases
where people have diagnosed themselves having heart
attacks, or diagnosed very hard-to-diagnose disorders by
typing their symptoms into Google.
Treatments, overall ongoing care, diagnoses, what does it
mean that I have a particular condition, a lot of those
searches and information needs come to Google.
In fact, overall, in terms of health information needs on
the web, about 66% of those information needs are met
first by search.
So in other words, users are already bringing a lot of
health queries to Google.
They start there, because the lion's share of that
search-first sector ends up at Google.
So we think that there's a big user information need that we
should ultimately fill, and fill it with really high
quality, reliable information.
The other observation that made us really interested in
this space is the incredible rate at which information is
being generated in the health sector.
So for example, in X-rays alone, it's speculated that
there's about two billion X-rays made every year.
And those X-rays would be around, on average, 10
megabytes each to digitize.
That's 200 petabytes of information.
And you can imagine that, at Google, the word petabytes
gets us really excited.
Because that's what we're good at.
We're good at handling large amounts of information, and
making it accessible, and organizing it, and storing it.
And so we think that there's a big win to be had here.
And this is just X-rays.
So when you look at, overall, what's happening in the health
industry, there's about 2,000 hospitals in North America.
And each of them, between X-rays, CAT scans, test
results, and other medical records and notations, are
generating about seven terabytes each of data.
That's a lot of data, and that's somewhere where we
think we can add a lot of value.
So where do we start in terms of Google products?
I think, for us, it will start with search, which is what
we've done already.
Around two years ago, we formed something called the
Google Co-op, where we anointed users and partnered
with users who were known experts in their fields, where
they were hand-labeling results that they believed to
be high quality information.
And the results of that are available now on the site.
So when you type in something like diabetes, which is shown
here, you actually don't just get our normal search results.
You get a set of categories on the top of the page that lead
to very reliable, hand-categorized results of
conditions, symptoms, risk factors, and
so on and so forth.
But bringing people to reliable health information
through search is something that we feel
really strongly about.
And we've made a good advance with Google Co-op already.
We also are looking at things like being
able to find doctors.
So people use Local and Maps all the time to find local
businesses.
We think that there's a layer we could add on top of that
that would make it easy to find doctors, understand their
specialties, whether or not they're accepting patients,
their certifications and affiliations.
These are things that we should ultimately have as part
of our local product, and also layered into the
Google Health offering.
And so this is something that we're excited about.
And finally, we've turned our attentions to a new area where
we're just getting started, which is
personal health records.
So about two years ago, Andy Grover approached us as
Hurricane Katrina was approaching New Orleans.
And he said, is there anything Google can do?
Because there's hundreds of thousands of complete,
lifelong medical histories in the basements of hospitals,
looking just like this, in paper form, that are about to
be destroyed and lost forever.
Can't you do something?
We have all this digitization technology for Google Book
Search, where we're photographing pages and trying
to capture and make that information digital.
Was there anything we could do?
And the truth is, in that moment, it was too late for us
to mobilize and actually make anything happen there.
But it did get us thinking about what we could do, and
what some of the advantages would be.
Because it doesn't make sense to generate this volume of
information in paper.
It should be, ultimately, something that is digital, is
on servers, and something that the user has a lot of control
over, where they can understand how to stitch
together their medical records from all the different places
they may be treated.
Hospitals, clinics, when they move across country, their
medical records come with them, because it's ultimately
in the user's control.
And how to make those records both digital and portable?
Maybe even so portable you could actually
carry it on a USB drive?
And there's a bunch of interesting use cases the fall
out of that.
One, there's travel.
So you can imagine being able to travel around the globe,
knowing that your medical record is just a few
keystrokes and a password away, and being able just to
bring up any local doctor to speed on your particular
conditions and treatments.
But it also helps in travel in things that are as simple as
immunizations.
So in August, I had a physical, and it turned out I
was overdue for a tetanus shot.
But you think about how hard it is right now to figure out
if you need a particular immunization.
It's just not easy.
And so you'd only have to call your doctor, and have them
look it up, and get back to.
But you can imagine, if you could just look it up as part
of an online account, it would be really useful.
There's also things that the web is particularly
well-suited for, which Mark alluded to in his comments,
like sharing and collaborating.
So when you look at the type of sharing that happens on
Facebook, or the types of sharing that happens on Google
Docs and spreadsheets, these are things where we think that
people, when we look at health patterns, people do share
their health information with friends and family.
And ultimately, those people take responsibility in helping
to care for their loved ones.
And this is something that the web is particularly
well-suited for, and it's something that we think we can
add a lot to.
And then finally, the actual storage and movement of this
information.
This is an envelope for X-rays, which is how most
X-rays move around right now.
When you think about the X-rays that are taken, just
because someone changed doctors, they need to be re
X-rayed, wouldn't it be better if it were actually in the
hands of the user, where they could
actually have their X-ray?
And when they move to a new doctor, instead of getting re
X-rayed, they could see it.
But in taking that data, making the movement of that
information more efficient and more accessible to the end
user, is something where we think we can
add a lot of value.
So this is obviously a really big vision, and this is
something that's going to take--
it's a huge endeavor.
It will be a multi-year process.
And it's going to take a lot of, ultimately, breakthroughs
in digitization, and breakthroughs in terms of
partnerships being formed.
This is something that we're committed to.
And we really think that there's a big advance in terms
of end user value to be delivered.
And you'll be seeing a lot more activity here in the
months to come.
So stay tuned.
Thanks.