Verily has rapidly ramped up its work in healthcare and research in the past two years with new initiatives and new hires.
Leveraging its technology capabilities, Verily, a subsidiary of Alphabet and Google's sister company, has expanded its work with employers through its Healthy at Work program and virtual care offerings. Launched in June 2020, the Healthy at Work program helps businesses and universities reopen safely with vaccine tracking and testing capabilities.
“2021 was a really big year for us at Verily, and in health platforms, we really saw the development and maturation of our five businesses,” said Vivian Lee, M.D., Ph.D., Verily's president of health platforms, during a Fierce JPM Week interview.
“We were able, through our Healthy at Work business, to support employers and millions of people through COVID testing, in part done through our CLIA-certified COVID testing lab in South San Francisco,” she said.
Verily closed out 2020 with a massive $700 million funding round that it’s used to rapidly scale up its commercial work. The company has expanded the reach of its virtual clinic, called Onduo, into multiple chronic conditions and also launched digital services geared toward mental and behavioral health. These moves bring Verily a step closer to its goals of delivering whole-person care through a single telehealth app.
The company also launched a stop-loss insurance company, which it has rebranded as Granular.
“We’ve achieved consistent, very strong growth, about three- to fourfold growth in revenue year over year in the last several years,” Lee told Fierce Healthcare. “I think we're showing that at this intersection of healthcare and technology and very sophisticated analytics, evidence generation, device technology and new sensors, that we are able to execute and we're able to deliver in a way that's really meaningful for our customers and for the people that we serve."
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The employer health market is a key target for Verily through its Healthy at Work program, Granular and its Onduo virtual clinic. "We really want to support businesses, employers and employees in building these products that make the right thing the easy thing to do for people to stay healthy," she said.
Verily also is leveraging its technology and new care models to help address mental health and substance use disorders. The company's OneFifteen business, a tech-enabled addiction treatment center in Dayton, Ohio, "grew substantially" in 2021, Lee said.
"We're really focused on supporting mental health and behavioral health, whether it's on the addiction side, with substance use disorders, or it's depression and anxiety and supporting people who are struggling right now. That focus on bridging the mind and body has been important to us, and it's going to continue to be really important for us in 2022," she said.
The company also has been working to innovate in value-based care and partner with health systems to provide analytics and artificial intelligence tools. Verily recently inked deals with Highmark Health and Mayo Clinic to develop tech tools for clinicians, patients and payers.
There has been speculation that Verily is looking to untangle itself from Google and move outside its parent company, Alphabet, which could signal an initial public offering.
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Lee wouldn’t speak to any potential IPO plans but was bullish on Verily’s ongoing growth as it leverages the strengths of its various businesses in healthcare and life sciences.
“I think the vision that Andy Conrad and other founders really put forward is something that is really coming to fruition now that we're seeing in terms of our current and future growth plans, and the synergies across the different parts of the company are going to be really beneficial,” she said.
Former FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner Amy Abernethy, M.D., Ph.D., jumped on board Verily last year to lead its clinical studies platform. There are significant opportunities to collaborate across Verily's clinical research and health platforms to advance data and evidence generation to support pharmaceutical companies as well as health systems and hospitals, Lee noted.
"We’re going to see a lot more of those synergies across the different components of Verily. And I think that what we're seeing so far is that each of the individual businesses is doing very well and creating, in a rather innovative way, solutions that are very much meeting market demand," she said. "I think together the synergies across the different businesses have the potential to be truly transformative. And we are starting already to see that now, and I think we'll continue to see that more in the next year or two."
Check out the Fierce JPM Week interview for more about Verily's work with OneFifteen, expanding its virtual clinic and its employer-focused initiatives.