The Promise of Precision Health

At Strategy Week, we unveiled our new purpose — to bring the promise of precision health to everyone, every day. That purpose unites our work across the company now and captures where we are headed in this next phase of our company’s growth.

Precision health is an approach to health that leverages data from a wide variety of clinical and non-clinical sources to arrive at the best intervention for a person or community. It represents a paradigm shift from “one size fits all” medicine to one focused on a more comprehensive view of the individual that leads to a more personalized path forward.

We’ve chosen each and every one of those 10 words in our purpose statement for a reason:

• Bring the promise — We want to significantly improve health and quality of life, and reduce the cost of care
• Of precision health — Integrating clinical and non-clinical data to develop personalized health solutions so that people live longer, healthier lives.
• To everyone — Broadening better health access to more populations
• Every day — From reactive to proactive care; empowering an ongoing relationship with health

Why “precision health” now? We are living in a time of massive increases in health information and computing power, combined with decreases in life expectancy, alarming and rising incidence of chronic diseases like diabetes, and increased demand for value-based care and improved outcomes. There are countless and often competing forces at work across the healthcare ecosystem that impact how health is managed and how healthcare is delivered. There are gaps in data, insights and incentives that all need to be addressed if we are to truly drive change and deliver on what we know is possible.

We recognize that precision health is not a new concept. The desire to have a comprehensive understanding of what is happening with an individual — to understand the patient based on all of the factors that ultimately impact their health — and then to be able to tailor the best course of action for that patient is something that has been a goal in healthcare for some time. What’s new is our increasing ability to use the power of technology, grounded in the realities of how we practice medicine, to create new tools to generate evidence, new infrastructure to handle data and new business models that can deliver on the promise of precision health. That is where Verily and our unprecedented combination of capabilities come in.

Verily is using its recognized expertise and capabilities in technology, data science and healthcare to enable the entire healthcare ecosystem to identify and deliver more targeted interventions that drive better health outcomes. We are focused on generating and applying evidence from a wide variety of sources to change the way people manage their health and the way healthcare is delivered. And as time goes on, we are focused on fueling continuous learning systems — where more data drive even better care, and where Verily solutions intersect to drive even greater value.

Watch this space for more on how we are making precision health a reality as Verily realizes our ambition — to bring the promise of precision health to everyone, every day.

Stephen