Medical Data Breakthrough: Google Aids PicnicHealth’s Growth
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In the fragmented world of U.S. healthcare, patients often have to wait in line or on hold, navigate multiple patient portals, and fill out numerous request forms—all in pursuit of their own medical history. Healthcare technology startup PicnicHealth is on a mission to put control back with the patient, where it belongs.
PicnicHealth’s growth, from closing successful venture rounds to winning machine learning (ML) competitions, speaks to not only improvements and opportunities in healthcare, but also how startups are leveraging Google Workspace and Google Cloud services to accelerate momentum.
The company does the heavy lifting of collecting records and leverages human-in-the-loop ML to transcribe and validate them with an abstraction team of medical professionals. The records are then structured into a complete medical history that patients can access and share with providers to get better care.
But PicnicHealth helps to improve patient health on more than one front. It allows patients to contribute their data to de-identified medical research, building high-quality, anonymized datasets that researchers and life sciences companies can use to better understand disease progression and treatment in the real world.
Google Workspace has been part of PicnicHealth from day one, helping the founders collaborate and shape the company’s vision using cloud-synced documents and spreadsheets to collaborate and model predictions. “I’ve had a Gmail account since 2006, and in college 100% of people worked out of Google Docs. Workspace continues to be the best choice for online collaboration, and that’s why it’s still the default standard for startups,” said Troy Astorino, CoFounder & CTO of PicnicHealth. “When we started PicnicHealth, my co-founder Noga Leviner was in San Francisco and I was in Southern California, and of course we used Workspace.”
Today, Google Workspace continues to play a central role in the company’s collaboration. “We create design documents in Google Docs, primarily for engineering and product changes, and get really healthy, vibrant discussions through comments,” noted Astorino. “This practice has grown beyond engineering and is used for everything from how the company operates to communication norms.”
Google Workspace offers everything the team needs to collaborate, no matter where employees are. PicnicHealth’s team has spread from San Francisco to being distributed across the country and around the world. Instant collaboration is crucial.
“We work in a complex domain where people need a lot of information to make good decisions,” said Astorino. “Google Workspace allows us to operate in a mode of default transparency, where people can easily get the information they need even if it wasn’t intentionally or directly shared with them. Whether it’s working in Docs or scheduling in Calendar, we can operate much more effectively than we could otherwise.”
By any measure, PicnicHealth’s trajectory is one of record success. The startup is a 2014 alumni of Y Combinator, a program that helped launch household names like Airbnb, DoorDash, and Dropbox. Three years later, the team went on to win the $1 million grand prize at Google’s Machine Learning Competition. And the momentum has continued— PicnicHealth has recently announced a $60 million Series C round, bringing the amount raised to date to over $100 million. With the Series C, PicnicHealth is investing in expanding its reach to more patients across over 30 diseases.
As a healthcare startup, PicnicHealth faced a very particular set of challenges, especially when working with and accessing data. Data fragmentation and interoperability are only some of the challenges of realizing the value of big data in the cloud. The healthcare industry is notoriously difficult to navigate due to sensitive data protection laws and regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
PicnicHealth started in the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, after migrating over to Kubernetes and facing an expanding list of requirements for HIPAA compliance, the company started to explore alternatives.
“We needed to be HIPAA compliant, which was going to be painful on AWS, and we wanted to get away from managing and operating our own Kubernetes clusters,” recalled Astorino. “We had heard good things about GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). And particularly valuable for us, — many technical requirements you need for HIPAA compliance are configured by default on Google Cloud.”
PicnicHealth would have had to implement a lot of changes and get specialized instance types to get their existing configuration to work. So, they began experimenting with Google Cloud and discovered a much smoother experience.
“It was a lot easier to manage in terms of product setup and developer experience,” said Astorino. “There is a sane product hierarchy of resources you can access and use through Google Cloud and the relationships between them, from coordinated IAM (identity and access management) to using Google Groups for granting permissions. Overall, it’s cleaner.”
Astorino added that the move has also opened the doors to taking advantage of other services in the Google Cloud ecosystem like Cloud SQL, BigQuery, and Cloud Composer. PicnicHealth also uses Security Command Center because it easily integrates with everything but also helps meet various compliance frameworks’ requirements, providing visibility, near-real-time asset discovery, and security information and event management.
But most importantly, the integrated ecosystem has simplified the work needed for PicnicHealth to create a secure environment for employees to use when working with sensitive medical records while still providing all the tools they need. For example, abstractors not only use Google Workspace but also have Chromebooks because they are easy to manage and secure.
Altogether, Google Cloud helps form a technology stack that has enabled the startup to build a massive labeled dataset containing over 100 million labeled medical data concepts. In turn, it accelerates PicnicHealth’s ability to generate highly-performant AI models and feed other ML pipelines, which has been vital for processing and reviewing data at scale.
To learn more about how Google Workspace and Google Cloud help startups like PicnicHealth accelerate their journey, visit our startups solutions pages for Google Workspace and Google Cloud.
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Google’s Tau VMs Help Nylas Reach New Heights!
Nylas is a leading provider of scalable and secure communications data platform that powers business process and productivity automation and drive digital engagement for its customers that are fast-growing start-ups as well as large enterprises. The company approached Google Cloud with a complex challenge involving its legacy architecture that gave rise to cost and scalability issues. Nylas processed 30 terrabytes of data, billions of messages and hundreds of millions of APIs per day! Moreover, to serve Nylas’ large enterprise customer in the Financial Services industry with stringent security needs and data storage infrastructure requirements to avoid in-memory hacks, they rewrote the entire infrastructure in Go and Kubernetes on top of Google.
Watch the video to learn how Google Cloud has been the best distributed technology and a true partner for Nylas, helping them achieve 40 percent in savings by moving to Tau VMs!
Largest Beauty Retailer in the US Powers Digital Transformation with Google Cloud Smart Analytics
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Digital technology offers increasing flexibility and choice to consumers. As a result, the retail industry is dramatically shifting toward more tailored and personalized experiences for shoppers, and businesses are rethinking how they deliver value to customers.
This couldn’t be more true for the beauty retailing industry where leading companies are turning to digital technology to create customized shopping experiences.
At Google Cloud, we’re particularly excited about our work with Ulta Beauty, the largest beauty retailer in the United States with more than 1196 stores in all 50 states, and how the company is using Google Cloud technology solutions to power personalization and redefine beauty retailing.
Established in 1990, Ulta Beauty has had incredible success as a company, and as customers become more discerning and curious about their purchases, the company is finding new ways to meet their changing needs.
Recently, leaders at Ulta Beauty recognized a huge opportunity to complement and enhance the shopping experience by helping beauty enthusiasts navigate through more than 500 brands and 25,000 products carried in their stores and online channel.
They decided to leverage the data from Ulta Beauty’s successful Ultamate Rewards loyalty program to create and offer more unique and personalized user experiences.
With more than 30 million members generating data through sales, transactions, product reviews, and social media engagement, Ulta Beauty’s Loyalty Program creates a comprehensive data set, and the company sought the right technology partner to help organize, analyze and transform that data into valuable insights for its customers.
Ulta Beauty’s leaders knew they had an opportunity to leverage data analytics and machine learning to reach customers in new ways, enhance the guest experience, and continue to grow their active loyalty member base. After considering a number of cloud providers, they chose to expand their existing partnership with Google Cloud.
“Google Cloud listened to our needs and worked in tandem with our engineering team to address our challenges,” said Michelle Pacynski, vice president of digital innovation at Ulta Beauty. “The ease of working with the Google Cloud team and their breadth of experience made the decision a no-brainer, laying the foundation for a great partnership.”
In 2019, Ulta Beauty announced it was working with Google Cloud Platform to unify and organize its data, using:
- BigQuery to perform data analysis and generate dynamic content, personalized product recommendations, and event-based messages for customers.
- Cloud Storage to provide highly available, secure, resilient and cost-effective access to data across the entire enterprise.
- Compute Engine for the high-performance scalability needed to grow with customer demand while painlessly migrating existing applications to the cloud.
- Anthos to build a hybrid cloud foundation that allows their applications to take advantage of all this data, combining the power and flexibility of GKE with the ability to leverage their existing investment in secure infrastructure on-premises.
Our partnership with Ulta Beauty has enabled increased engagement with customers in store and online, and the creation of new tools and capabilities, including a new Virtual Beauty Advisor tool to deliver tailored recommendations and help shoppers choose the right products, and a Customer Conversation Platform that’s enabling deeper connections with guests, ultimately driving customer loyalty.
“It’s been a really efficient process so far due in part to the ease of working with the Google team,” said Michelle Pacynski, vice president of digital innovation at Ulta Beauty. “They’re experienced, approachable, and their can-do style makes for a great partnership. They listened to our needs and worked in tandem with our engineering team, figuring things out, and getting it done.”
Indonesia moves towards advanced education with Cloud, ML & Mobile Development
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Indonesia is leading the way for digital transformation in Southeast Asia. According to Google’s e-Conomy South East Asia report, the country’s 2030 Gross Merchandise Value – the value of online retailing to consumers – could be twice the value of the whole of Southeast Asia today.
This growth means that many companies need more qualified IT graduates and employees with digital skills than they have today. Fast-growing tech companies need more qualified IT graduates, and employees with digital skills. According to the World Bank, Indonesia needs an additional nine million people with digital skills by 2030. The shortage of technical talent reiterates the need to invest in a reliable skills pipeline.
Following years of digital talent developments in Indonesia, Google has become a supporter of Bangkit, an academy designed to produce high-caliber technical talent for Indonesian technology companies and startups. Bangkit has facilitated a multi-stakeholder collaboration between Google, government, industry, and universities across Indonesia.
Last year, the President of Indonesia and the Ministry of Education and Culture, Research, and Technology, acknowledged Bangkit’s significant impact, with 3,000 students completing nearly 15,000 courses and specialisations.
Building on last year’s success, Bangkit started its 2022 program in February, offering three learning paths to students:
- Cloud computing with Google Cloud, preparing students for the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification. Some of the course components are also available online
- Mobile development with Android, preparing students for the Google Associate Android Developer exam. An online version is available here.
- Machine learning with Tensorflow, getting students ready to take the Tensorflow Developer certification. Some of the online courses are available here for others.
Bangkit 2022 has enrolled 3,100 university students who will take a five month study course, obtaining university study credit, as well as industry certifications. The program accepts diverse cohorts of people who are passionate about preparing for a tech career in the near future, with support and encouragement for women, people with disabilities, and students from across Indonesia to apply.
Since its pilot in 2019, Bangkit has been guided by three principles:
- Industry-led: provides curriculum and instructors from industry experts, including Google, GoTo and Traveloka. Instructors include key figures such as Laurence Moroney (Google, Lead AI Advocate), Google Developer Experts, and other committed professionals.
- Immersive: combines online learning methods conducted in both individual and group settings.
- Interdisciplinary: contains knowledge and best practices in tech, soft skills, and English to provide complete career readiness.
The program runs from February to July 2022, and has a 900-hour curriculum throughout the 18-week learning experience.
Benefits for students participating in Bangkit include:
- Study credit conversion
- Job opportunities at our career fair
- Google Cloud, TensorFlow and AAD exam vouchers
- Incubation funds and mentorship support from industry
Towards the end of Bangkit 2022, students will team up for the Capstone Project challenge to propose solutions to some of the nation’s most pressing problems, such as environmentalism, accessibility, and more. The top 15 teams will be selected to receive funding to incubate their capstone projects. These education and career-preparedness offerings are provided at no cost.
Google is partnering with industry, governments, universities, and employers to help meet the skill demands of today. From supporting the State of Ohio to offer tech skills to residents, to working with the University of Minnesota-Rochester to create a customized health sciences degree program, Google is here to help our partners prepare those they serve for a cloud-first world.
APAC’s Retail Digital Pulse by Google Cloud and IDC Retail Index
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In the post COVID-19 pandemic world, some retail businesses have aced digital transformation while others are still lagging behind. The Google Cloud commissioned IDC Retail Insights analyzed over 1, 108 retailers across seven nations in the Asia Pacific region and across eight different segments (online, drugstores, speciality shops, convenience stores, department stores, restaurants, supermarkets and hypermarkets/big box stores) to develop Google Cloud Retail Digital Index. The digital maturity was reviewed in five dimensions that define the digital pulse like strategy, people, data, technology and process.
Apart from empowering retail brands to live up to customer expectations, technology is the backbone to back-office operations and still ranks low in the digital pulse. Download the Google-ODC InfoBrief to catch up on the latest, detailed insights on Asia Pacific’s Retail Digital Index along with essential guidance on driving digital transformation, use cases and more!
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How Google’s Customer Data Platform Helps Retail Brands Offer Data-driven , Personalized CX
Retail companies need customer insights to deliver personalized experiences that impact revenue generation and cost savings. Watch how Google Cloud’s customer data platform helps brands integrate and build holistic view of data in silos to drive marketing and customer service success.
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