Unlocking health data for every individual

“Las Vegas is a wonderful place for wastewater monitoring, because not only do we have 2.5 million residents here in the Las Vegas Valley — on any given day we have 300,000 tourists — and wastewater is another way to contribute to the health and welfare of this community.

Our treatment facility processes over 115 million gallons of water daily, allowing us to see what’s going on in the Las Vegas Valley and the bustling Strip. We send our water samples to Verily and within 24 hrs get results about the levels of pathogens present in the wastewater. We can then share that information with our public health officials and they can take actions to keep our community safe. The local public health department has gained invaluable data that has aided in risk communication, intervention evaluation, resource allocation, and clinician education.”

“As a primary care provider, we feel it is a great advantage to have the technology in-house because it not only helps us with the patients, but also helps us with the metrics for Medicaid and Medicare Advantage plans that are asking us to have eye exams for 100% of our patients. So we feel blessed that we have access so quickly with a device inside the office.

Many times patients don't have symptoms when it's an early stage of retinopathy. Sometimes patients are reluctant to get the exam done because they feel fine. Having the machine in the office — we can easily tell the patient, let's get it done, it's for your good! There’s no co-payment, there’s no waiting time. We’re detecting a lot of cases of early diabetic retinopathy that otherwise we would not.

“When we get selected as a site, the sponsor will ship us out binders for everything. So we'll get this massive shipment of about 3 or 4 different binders. They have all of our protocols. Anybody who's touching any of our patients through the duration of our trial is going to be using this protocol, the pharmacy, for mixing all the medication, our nurses for infusing anything, any of the people, drawing all of our blood that all lives within this binder. So we cannot run our trial without this. Nobody can touch a patient without this.

We're starting to digitize all of our protocols. We're using Verily CTMS – instead of having all these papers here, the protocol is going to be actually uploaded into the system. So we can just easily reference all the data we need within that system without having to come through these binders, through these folders and go page by page and look for things like that.”

I think people with diabetes really need to know how what they eat affects their health. Having the app at my fingertips 24-7 was really helpful. It was great to have information in one place. I liked the fact that if there was a question that needed to be bumped up, I could be referred to someone like an actual doctor. You can do that on the go. It really just takes a few minutes. You don’t have to worry about booking a doctor's appointment or dropping into urgent care.

Another feature of the app that I found particularly helpful was the meal logging agent. I can take a picture of my meal, and it lets me know information about the nutrition of what I was eating. I think that's really helpful to be able to do it right in the moment. It offers healthy meal options as alternatives to some of the not-so-healthy meals I’ve been eating — as well as healthy snacks and recipes.