Verily, a precision health company and subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, is laying off around 15% of its employees, the company said in a blog post Wednesday.
Verily CEO Stephen Gillett said the layoffs were due to the company’s larger restructuring efforts and elimination of certain programs. The company is discontinuing its analytics tool, Verily Value Suite, as well as specific projects in remote patient monitoring for heart failure and microneedles for drug delivery.
Some employees will be reassigned but many will leave the company, Gillett said. A total of 200 employees are affected, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
“While these programs are promising and led by talented [employees], and some of their innovations will integrate into our other core solutions, we cannot do everything and have had to make some difficult choices,” Gillett said in the post.
Amid economic headwinds, other big tech firms with a hand in healthcare have similarly cut jobs including Salesforce and Amazon. Overall, the digital health industry has been hit hard by layoffs with several companies cutting jobs.
As part of its restructuring, Verily co-founder and chief medical officer Dr. Jessica Mega is leaving the company along with Dr. Vivian Lee,president of health platforms, according to a report from STAT. Dr. Amy Abernethy has been promoted to chief medical officer. Abernethy was a former official at the Food and Drug Administration before coming to Verily.
In September, Verily raised a $1 billion investment to support the expansion of its precision health business, specifically focused on real world evidence generation, healthcare data platforms, research and care and underlying technology. In the blog, Gillett said the company is focusing its efforts on precision health and evidence-based platforms.
Like other big tech firms, Alphabet has had its challenges in disrupting the healthcare industry. Google Health’s president Dr. David Feinberg left for EHR vendor Cerner in 2021 and the company discontinued having its health projects under a single unit.
