Verily lays out ‘Chapter 3’, streamlining its business under a new CEO and focusing on commercial side: #HLTH23

For Ver­i­ly, it’s been a year of con­nect­ing the dots.

The eight-year-old com­pa­ny got its start as Al­pha­bet’s life sci­ences arm and, over the years, has launched nu­mer­ous prod­ucts and projects. In Jan­u­ary 2023, Ver­i­ly brought in for­mer pres­i­dent Stephen Gillett as CEO, mak­ing changes to its lead­er­ship team and con­duct­ing lay­offs.

The changes that went in­to ef­fect in Jan­u­ary and are aimed at stream­lin­ing Ver­i­ly’s strat­e­gy, prod­ucts, and or­ga­ni­za­tion­al and op­er­at­ing mod­els, Gillett told End­points News on the side­lines of the HLTH con­fer­ence in Las Ve­gas. The goal is to make Ver­i­ly a more com­mer­cial-fo­cused or­ga­ni­za­tion.

“This has been the year of ex­e­cut­ing our plan,” Gillett said.

Chap­ter 1 was four to five years of R&D, as Ver­i­ly test­ed out big ideas. Ver­i­ly’s sec­ond chap­ter was the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, as it leaned in­to test­ing and work­ing with oth­er com­pa­nies look­ing to keep their em­ploy­ees safe dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

Amy Aber­nethy

“Now we are in Chap­ter 3,” Gillett said.

In ad­di­tion to stream­lin­ing its or­ga­ni­za­tion­al struc­ture, Ver­i­ly’s plan is to fo­cus on three ar­eas: Re­search (the work it does around clin­i­cal tri­als), care (tools like a reti­nal cam­era that can be used in pri­ma­ry care of­fices), and health fi­nanc­ing (its in­sur­ance busi­ness).

Amy Aber­nethy, pres­i­dent of prod­uct de­vel­op­ment and chief med­ical of­fi­cer at Ver­i­ly, is tasked with mak­ing all of that work to­geth­er.

“If you’re go­ing to build to­wards im­prov­ing pre­ci­sion health, we be­lieve we need to build to­wards hav­ing a da­ta and tech­nol­o­gy bridge be­tween re­search and care,” and how that might come to­geth­er with how health­care is paid for, Aber­nethy said.

That means a com­mon tech­ni­cal plat­form, Aber­nethy said. “2023 be­came the year where we re­al­ly turned that cor­ner to now re­plat­form­ing on the back end, in prepa­ra­tion for how things fit to­geth­er.”

(This sto­ry is from our new Health Tech newslet­ter. If you’d like to sign-up, just click here.)