Google hires former FDA digital health leader

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The new senior director of global digital health strategy is a former Food and Drug Administration leader. The chief digital health officer of global strategy and innovation at the FDA was Bakul Patel, who spent over a decade at the FDA.

He wrote in a Linkedin post Monday that he was looking forward to learning from the teams in health across the two companies and helping build a unified digital health and regulatory strategy.

Over the past few years, Google has pushed further into health and healthcare, with mixed results. Its ambitions include mining big data, developing disease- detecting tools, and pumping wearables full of health features. The company's strategy has gone through some changes, the most recent of which was the dissolution of the health division. The division's head left the company.

There is a new door between federal regulatory agencies and Alphabet. Robert Califf is the current FDA Commissioner. Karen DeSalvo is the former director of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.