Google chief health officer Dr. Karen says farewell

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Google’s chief health officer Karen DeSalvo announced she will retire this summer. DeSalvo, who likes to introduce herself as Dr. Karen, joined Google in 2019 and became the face of the company’s health efforts in 2021 when VP of health David Feinberg left to join EHR company Cerner (Now part of Oracle Health). Google at the time disbanded its formal health organization that was reeling from a controversy around data sharing with health system Ascension. 

Google works on health across consumer products like search, YouTube and wearables; services and software for pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and insurers; and global public health and health research. 

But Google has found new relevance in health care because it’s one of the leading developers of large language models. The company has made a special effort to position this work for health care uses cases, and it’s locked down big name partners like hospital chain HCA. Google DeepMind, another arm of the Alphabet octopus, has made important breakthroughs in using AI for life sciences. Just last week, researchers at Google released a pre-print detailing new work on AMIE, an experimental diagnostic chatbot. 

How much credit can DeSalvo take for Google’s AI health development? Unclear. She’ll be replaced by her current deputy, Michael Howell, a physician who has been with Google over seven years and leads the company’s clinical team.

Smart ring maker Oura this morning announced new features for metabolic health, including a way to track meals and blood sugar levels through a tie-in with Stelo, Dexcom’s over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor (CGM). The latter is the obvious development after Dexcom poured $75 million into Oura’s latest funding round. 

Since Stelo was cleared by the Food and Drug Administration last year, our biggest question has been if it would be more than a lifestyle product offering healthy people more metrics to fuss over. For example, it might help people who typically can’t get a prescription CGMs covered by insurance, including those with with type 2 diabetes who don’t use insulin or people who have prediabetes.

Maziar Brumand, a VP of product at Oura, told me the company imagines a range of possible users for the Stelo integration and its metabolic tools. Some people may try it once as a curiosity while others might realize they should be doing more to keep their glucose in a healthy range. As a theory of behavior change, Brumand suggested the rapid feedback between meals and other activities and changes in blood glucose could reinforce healthy lifestyle choices.

Lab testing startup eats body scan startup

Katie Palmer writes: Function Health, co-founded by Mark Hyman, a friend of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., announced the acquisition of full-body MRI company Ezra yesterday — terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The companies aim to combine their annual cash-pay screening models — Function, with more than a hundred lab tests, and Ezra with an “AI-powered” MRI — to build baselines for patients to inform preventative care. 

Ezra is selling the promise of early cancer detection, but it’s also finding a way to market radiology AI directly to patients. It claims it can lower the cash price of those full-body MRIs because its FDA-cleared algorithm for image enhancement shortens scan times to less than a half hour. Yes, there are similar image enhancement algorithms built into many MRIs these days. 

Insurance usually doesn’t cover full-body MRIs, especially for symptomless patients, in part because of concerns that spurious findings can result in harmful overdiagnosis and overtreatment. To address those concerns, Ezra CEO Emi Gal said, the company also layers an LLM-powered tool — this one is not cleared by the FDA — that interprets the radiology report to give MRI findings an “E-score” of one to five, from asymptomatic informative findings to potential cancer. “That helps us minimize unnecessary follow-up, unnecessary downstream procedures and anxiety,” said Gal. The call that patients have to make is if all that is worth $1000 a year to them.

Hims beats expectations but what’s ahead?

Hims & Hers reported $586 million in revenue for the first quarter of 2025, well above what it forecasted. However, the company’s full-year revenue guidance remains unchanged, as it navigates a shift in its business offering compounded versions of GLP-1 drugs after the FDA removed the branded versions from its shortage list.

A few notes from the earnings call: 

On the shifting GLP-1 business: CEO Andrew Dudum said Hims hopes to transition “subscribers previously on commercially available dosages of semaglutide to either appropriate alternatives on our platform or other platforms entirely by the end of the second quarter.” He forecasted this will result in a “one-time quarter-over-quarter revenue drop.” 

On continued compounding despite Novo Nordisk deal: Dudum said Hims was up front about the company’s intent to continue offering “personalized” doses of GLP-1 drugs. “I think there’s an alignment that both the regulation allows for it, and we believe there’s a need, whether or not there’s total agreement with regard to how much of that should be available to what types of consumers. Will our organizations ever align on that perfectly? Probably not.”

On recent Eli Lilly lawsuits alleging some telehealth companies are illegally directing provider decision-making: “We as a corporate entity do not do anything and try very hard to not engage with provider group when it comes to clinical decision making,” said Dudum. “There is a very strong wall there where providers have independent judgment in collaboration with their patient.” (Hims is not a defendant in the lawsuits.)

On the recent acquisition of a lab testing facility: Dudum underscored the company’s desire move to a more “proactive and preventative care model” suggesting that in the future this kind of testing could result in vitamin supplementation and prescriptions to head off risk of health conditions. 

What we’re reading

• Mr. Smith gets a Neuralink implant, Core Memory
• What’s happening at CDRH? RIFs, retirements, user fees, and unknowns, Market Pathways
• OpenAI says nonprofit will retain control of company, bowing to outside pressure, CNBC