Google Health’s Adam Bosworth Leaves Google

I got a tip that Google vice president Adam Bosworth, who headed up the Google Health project, had left Google. Now Google has provided me with the first confirmation this is so — Bosworth is leaving the company. Says Google: Adam is a great talent and was instrumental in starting Google Health. He is now […]

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I got a tip that Google vice president Adam Bosworth, who headed up the Google
Health project, had left Google. Now Google has provided me with the first confirmation this is so — Bosworth
is leaving the company. Says Google:

Adam is a great talent and was instrumental in starting Google Health. He
is now on vacation and has decided to pursue other opportunities after that.
Marissa Mayer is taking over the health team in the interim until a new team
leader takes over. Google is moving forward with work on our health products.

Bosworth joined
Google in July 2004,
having left
BEA Systems. In early 2006, he gained
attention as being
"architect, Google Health." Despite some high expectations among Google
observers, a major Google Health search engine or service didn’t emerge that
year. Instead, Google released a general tagging system (Google
Coop
) that was used to categorize pages related to health care, among other
topics.

To date, this system has remained the main way Google has explicitly tried to
organize health information for consumers, as Bosworth himself

explained
on the Google Blog at the end of 2006.
Another Bosworth post
from last May covered how technology might help with health care, with the idea
that two parties could share health information in a trusted and secure manner.
From the notes of a
speech
(PDF format) he mentioned in his post:

It is Google’s vision that these two core capabilities, reliable
unambiguous computable medical data and safe systems for trust and
authentication and controlled access will dovetail with the consumer needs for
discovery about everything in their health arena. As this rolls out and
consumers truly can discover what is the state of the art and what they should
know about their treatments, where they are being treated, how they are being
treated, and how they will mange their diseases or recovery, this consumer
awareness will lead to far greater consumer control, far better health data,
and inevitably, to a very different health world than the current one.

Last month,
screenshots
emerged of what might be a Google Health product, a list of
forms someone would fill out to keep a medical history record with Google.

Bosworth is still listed on the
Google Management page,
but I expect he’ll be removed in the near future. That will be the second coming
change in as many months for that page, after
Google CFO George Reyes
resigned last month
. Reyes is also still listed at the moment, as he is
remaining with the company until a replacement is found, expected by the end of
this year.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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