Latest news with #DeSalvo
New York Post
10-05-2025
- General
- New York Post
Dog rescued from East River finds forever home with cop who saved her
In little over a month, a tiny dog named Hudson went from ruffing it on the East Side to living it up in her forever home on Staten Island. Hudson, the Maltese mix that was rescued from the frosty waters of the East River in early April, has been adopted by Jared DeSalvo and his family. DeSalvo was one of the NYPD Harbor Unit officers who saved the 2-year-old pooch. Advertisement 5 Officer DeSalvo's children Salvatore and Stella were all smiled when they met Hudson. Kevin C Downs forThe New York Post 'I know my family was very interested in the dog, and I think it's a great opportunity to kind of give her a second chance,' DeSalvo told The Post. Hudson, who was nicknamed after the western waterway despite being pulled out of the East River, was spotted bobbing just off Pier 15 at the South Street Seaport. Advertisement 'She's a very cute dog, clearly, but despite her very cute, tiny exterior, she's tough because it's rough waters and she really held up on her own,' he added. 'It's nice to be able to provide her a home.' 5 Hudson will be the Staten Island family's second dog. Kevin C Downs forThe New York Post Within days of her rescue, DeSalvo had checked in on Hudson at the Irving and Phyllis Millstein Foundation for Animal Welfare Adoption Center in Queens. Following a second visit, he knew Hudson was a keeper. Advertisement He and his wife, Nicole, surprised their two kids, Salvatore, 9, and Stella, 8, when they picked the pup up Saturday. 'They know about the rescue from the day that it happened, and ever since that day, they've been asking constantly about the status of the dog,' DeSalvo said. 'They're very concerned about her, and we did mention that, if the opportunity came up, we would like to adopt the dog, but there were no promises.' 5 DeSalvo waited to see if anyone would claim Hudson before moving to adopt. Kevin C Downs forThe New York Post The children were told they were being brought to a communion party, the dad explained. Advertisement When the big reveal came, Stella started jumping up and down. The brother and sister then took turns holding Hudson, he said. The DeSalvos would've adopted Hudson sooner, but because she was found with a harness and leash, they waited to see if anyone would claim her. 'I told him to take this dog home when he first sent me the picture when he was on the boat, but Jared is a rule follower,' his wife Nicole told The Post. 'She's just an adorable dog. 5 Nicole DeSalvo wanted to adopt the dog the second she saw a photo of her. Kevin C Downs forThe New York Post 'When he sent me the picture of her on the boat and she was all wet and wrapped up in the towel, the first message I sent back was, 'Bring my baby home to me.' And now, here she is.' Hudson won't be the only dog at the DeSalvo home: The family already has a 15-year-old terrier named Bocce. '[Bocce] gets along great with other dogs, so they'll be best buds,' said DeSalvo. Advertisement The children made sure Hudson would feel right at home, ordering her a dog bed, treats and a plethora of chew toys. Hudson will even be wearing a high-tech collar that comes equipped with a GPS tracker — just in case. 5 DeSalvo said Hudson will be very well taken care of. Kevin C Downs forThe New York Post DeSalvo said it was important to give Hudson a good life. 'I think it sets a good example in terms of compassion, making sure that we take care of those that need help, and it's a unique situation when we get to actually do it,' he said. 'So, she's gonna be very well taken care of.'
Time Magazine
08-05-2025
- Health
- Time Magazine
Karen DeSalvo
As Google's first chief health officer, Dr. Karen DeSalvo says she invented the job as she went. There was a lot to create. Since arriving at Google in 2019, she has capitalized on health applications of technology like generative AI, and in 2024 Google Health launched the latest version of AlphaFold, an revolutionary modeling tool that helps biomedical researchers predict the shape of proteins as they develop new drugs and treatments for human diseases. Under DeSalvo's leadership (she recently announced she will retire this summer), Google Health also modernized how doctors and scientists, as well as patients, understand health care data. In May 2024, the company released Med-Gemini, an AI-based tool to help doctors and researchers make sense of the increasing volumes of medical data, from health records and images to journal articles. And to help patients navigate the confusing U.S. health care system, Google is developing digital agents that can research symptoms, make appointments with health care providers, and evaluate which treatment options are right for them. DeSalvo's team also oversaw the development of the 2024 Pixel watch, which has a new feature that detects when someone no longer has a pulse and immediately calls emergency services.
Forbes
02-05-2025
- Health
- Forbes
Google's Chief Health Officer Is Retiring
Google's chief health officer, Dr. Karen DeSalvo, announced today that she will be retiring. Dr. DeSalvo's career at the company has spanned nearly 6 years and has witnessed some of the most crucial and historical milestones in healthcare, both for the organization and society as a whole. Notably, she spearheaded the company's response to the Covid-19 pandemic, in addition to building out the larger framework for the approach to artificial intelligence and healthcare. Additionally, her tenure also oversaw significant expansion of the healthcare ecosystem across devices, YouTube, information sharing and the growth of industry partnerships. Previously a celebrated public health leader and a practicing physician, Dr. DeSalvo started the role in 2019 with a noble goal: enable technology to make the delivery of medicine and clinical care better, in order to ultimately improve societal health outcomes. Accordingly, under her leadership, Google's healthcare function saw significant growth and expansion. During the pandemic, for example, Google and YouTube became one of the primary sources of information for billions of people worldwide. Over time, the portfolio has continued to rapidly expand; much of Dr. DeSalvo's time at the company has been devoted to meeting industry leaders and operators on the ground to better understand pain-points and obstacles first-hand from communities and partners. Though Google has always invested significantly in data, this work was focused on using that data and information as a meaningful tool to help communities, organizations and patients stay informed and make decisions about their health. The fact that technology companies have a healthcare practice and division seems somewhat routine now. After all, many other tech giants, including Amazon Health and Microsoft, have certainly made their intentions clear and have invested billions of dollars to establish their own sub-organizations dedicated to the field. However, when Dr. DeSalvo started, this was not necessarily the norm; in fact, a technology company dedicating an entire ecosystem to something as complex and nuanced as healthcare was by no means ordinary. Rather, a team had to be built from the ground-up, and this process was uncharted territory. In fact, it was such a unique phenomenon that Google's process in building this team was actually published in the New England Journal of Medicine and is frequently cited as foundational learning for companies that envision playing a part in the modern healthcare technology ecosystem. Dr. DeSalvo says that one aspect she is most proud of during her time is the subtle yet crucial transition of the Google Health function being viewed as solely advisors to becoming true partners across the company: 'We're in a great place as a team and as a company to leverage the best in technology and information to help billions of people.' She also describes how proud she is of the immense work that has been done across the wider portfolio. A few examples include: the growth of Google Cloud, which has enabled scores of partners to better scale services for their patients; a robust ecosystem for medical content creation and information on YouTube, which has enabled an entirely new way of knowledge sharing and education; and most recently, the company's aggressive push into generative AI, which has empowered an incredibly promising road ahead for the company. An extremely crucial aspect of Google Health's growth journey and success is chief clinical officer, Dr. Michael Howell, who will soon be taking over Dr. DeSalvo's role. Dr. Howell, a critical care physician by training, started at the company as a principal scientist with Google Brain, and quickly transitioned to becoming a leader across the wider healthcare portfolio. His work has undisputedly been one of the key ingredients in Google Health's success story. Dr. Howell explains that during his time working with Dr. DeSalvo, he's seen the clinical team expand significantly, both in terms of people and portfolio. However, the mission has always been consistent: 'we know what good care should look like; we have spent so much time thinking and talking about what is the right model to build healthcare products that will actually help people." Congruent to this sentiment, Dr. DeSalvo comments—'he is the perfect person to step into this role. He is always thinking about the person at the other end of the technology and brings his lived experiences for the team and the products. That's why Dr. Howell is a unicorn.' Why is all of this important? Because healthcare and technology have become remarkably intertwined over the past decade, and technology companies will undoubtedly redefine the course of the industry for decades to come. The people and leaders that undertake this momentous task matter. Innovation has enabled individuals, health systems, organizations and devices to collect incredibly vast amounts of data. In fact, RBC Capital Markets reports that the healthcare industry generates nearly 30% of the world's entire volume of data. And now, it is upto innovators to figure out how to use that data to actually move the needle on improving health outcomes. This is why, as mentioned above, technology giants across the board are investing billions of dollars in the sector and are dedicating entire divisions to work on healthcare's hardest problems. The intersection of healthcare and technology is just getting started, especially with so much potential with data interoperability, consumer wearables and generative AI, to name just a few modalities. The technology industry as whole, including Google/Alphabet's work, has shown incredible promise in solving some of healthcare's toughest challenges. It certainly will not be an easy road; after all, healthcare is not the most malleable industry to implement change in. However, there has undoubtedly been immense progress in a relatively short time. For healthcare's story, it is still very much the 'early days,' and assuredly, there is still plenty of opportunity to create impact. Dr. DeSalvo enthusiastically shares this optimism: 'we're at a time of abundance. For decades, healthcare has always been painted as restrictive—not enough physicians, not enough staff, not enough resources. But now, with generative AI and technology as a whole, we can do so much with so little. I am excited and hopeful that this abundance will ultimately translate to better care and better health outcomes.'
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Google Says Its Error-Ridden "AI Overviews" Will Now Give Health Advice
Google's crappy "AI Overviews" regularly spits out dangerous and incorrect answers — and now it's being entrusted with medical advice. In a self-congratulatory blog post, Google's chief health officer Karen DeSalvo claimed that "recent health-focused advancements on Gemini models" and "our best-in-class quality and ranking systems" will allow the janky feature to "cover thousands more health topics." Troublingly, the update will include a new feature called "What People Suggest," which will provide health advice from amateurs around the internet. Though DeSalvo said the feature is available on mobile devices in the US, we weren't able to access it on either the Google app or the web, which uses Google — and we've reached out to the company to ask what's up with that. As Futurism and other outlets have extensively documented, Google's AI Overviews are cartoonishly bad at providing accurate information. From claiming that baby elephants can fit in the palm of a human hand to suggesting you put glue on your pizza, Google's in-search AI has consistently struggled to differentiate between fact and fiction in the nearly two years since its launch. Indeed, a recent study from Columbia's Tow Center for Digital Journalism found that the search giant's Gemini chatbot, which undergirds AI Overviews, got basic questions wrong an astounding 60 percent of the time — and Google hasn't explained how it plans to fix that problem. Ironically, Google used to have hundreds of human employees whose jobs centered around health — but in 2021, the company closed its health division and either laid off or reshuffled the people who staffed it. Citing past failures at follow-through on big-vision health tech projects, dozens of experts who spoke to Bloomberg last summer said they were concerned that Google's AI will give accurate and high-quality healthcare information — and there's been little in the intervening period to suggest that those anxieties have been assuaged. "If Google's overall ambition is to completely disrupt the health-care industry, well, nobody in the big tech world has succeeded," explained Emarketer senior analyst Rajiv Leventhal told Bloomberg at the time. "Health care is a unique beast." We've reached out to Google to ask about how it plans to verify that the health information in its AI provides accurate and safe health responses. The last time we asked the company about AI Overviews, it told us that there "may not be a lot of high-quality web content available" for some questions, and as such, the feature will sometimes simply get it wrong. "We have guardrails and policies in place to protect against low-quality responses," a company spokesperson told Futurism a few weeks ago, "and when issues arise we use those examples to improve and take appropriate action under our policies." More on Google AI: Did Google Test an Experimental AI on Kids, With Tragic Results?
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Google launches new healthcare-related features for Search, Android
Google on Tuesday announced new products and features aimed at healthcare use cases, including improved overviews in Google Search for health queries, medical records APIs, and new health-focused "open" AI models. In Search, Google says it's using AI and ranking systems to expand "knowledge panel" answers on thousands of health-related topics, and adding support for healthcare queries in Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese on mobile. Search already provided knowledge panel answers for ailments such as the flu or the common cold, but the update greatly expands the number of topics the knowledge panels cover, the company said. Google is also debuting a Search feature it's calling "What People Suggest" on mobile in the U.S. to highlight content from users with shared experiences relating to health conditions. For instance, if someone asks about common exercises for people dealing with arthritis, What People Suggest will collate reports from various forums around the web using AI. What People Suggest builds on capabilities like Google's personal health stories feature on YouTube, and seems pretty clearly aimed at keeping people from leaving Search for Reddit and other sources of health advice. "While people come to Search to find reliable medical information from experts, they also value hearing from others who have similar experiences," Karen DeSalvo, chief health officer at Google, wrote in a blog post provided to TechCrunch. "Using AI, we're able to organize different perspectives from online discussions into easy-to-understand themes, helping you quickly grasp what people are saying." Google on Tuesday also launched new medical records APIs globally for its Health Connect platform for Android devices. These will help collect data from medical providers and let users see this data across different apps, as well as make it easier to access the info on devices like phones, Google said. "These APIs enable apps to read and write medical record information like allergies, medications, immunizations, and lab results in standard FHIR format," DeSalvo explained in the blog post. "With these additions, Health Connect supports over 50 data types across activity, sleep, nutrition, vitals, and now medical records — making it easier to connect your everyday health data with data from your doctor's office." In other product announcements pertaining to health, Google said that the Loss of Pulse Detection feature on its Pixel Watch 3 smartwatch, which has received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), will launch by the end of March in the U.S. The feature can detect when you've experienced a loss of pulse — for example, due to primary cardiac arrest, respiratory or circulatory failure, overdose, or poisoning — and automatically prompt a call to emergency services if you're unresponsive. Google also unveiled new open AI models for drug discovery called TxGemma, following the company's launch of a collection of Gemini AI models for multimodal use cases in healthcare. TxGemma is set to be released in the coming weeks.
