Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Verily Life Sciences has named Cynthia Patton, a longtime in-house lawyer for biopharmaceutical giant Amgen Inc., as the health care tech startup's next general counsel. 

Patton will take the reins of Verily's legal department in San Francisco in late August. She succeeds Claudia Walsh, who now works for Facebook Inc. as director and associate general counsel. 

At the moment, Verily is largely focused on providing COVID-19 screening, testing and data analytics through its Project Baseline program, which the firm rolled out in 2017 as part of an effort to collect, store and map health care data. Verily asserts that its massive data collection practices comply with federal and state regulations. 

"We now have a platform that's making a huge difference in the pandemic that we're living in," Patton said Thursday. "That's the kind of work that they're doing. It's stuff that nobody is really thinking, 'What is this applicable to this second?' But in a year, two years, whatever from now, we'll find that we were being very prescient about what we need in health care." 

Verily launched in 2015 and is an independent subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet. The company found itself embroiled in a bit of a political controversy in March, when President Donald Trump claimed during a news conference that Google and 1,700 of its engineers had developed a coronavirus testing program that already covered "many, many locations." 

Verily later clarified that it was a sister company of Google and had been "screening and testing for high risk individuals at Bay Area locations," but hoped to expand the program as it acquired more testing kits and sites. 

In announcing Patton's appointment Wednesday, Verily CEO Andy Conrad stated in a blog post that the health care industry is in the midst of an evolution, "where access and affordability are critical to public health." He added that Patton would help Verily "continue to navigate the changing environment and to expand our efforts in COVID-19 and beyond."

When she was interviewing with Verily, Patton said she was impressed with Conrad's desire to "democratize or try to democratize health care, particularly around diversity in clinical trials." 

She added, "That's something I've been very passionate about. … To me data and info is knowledge and we've got to figure out a way to get that to everybody." 

Patton, who has been drawn to data analytics for the past several years, wants to disrupt the break-and-then-fix model of health care. She sees Verily leveraging predictive tech to help health care providers diagnose and treat illnesses before symptoms emerge. 

"I think they're really going to be poised to change the world. And I'm excited about having even a small part in that," she said. 

Patton has spent the past 15 years with Amgen, where she began as an associate general counsel and worked her way up to senior vice president and chief compliance officer. She has overseen the company's commercial legal affairs in the U.S. and served as lead commercial lawyer for Amgen's oncology and inflammation business units. 

Earlier in her career, she was general counsel for SCAN Health Plan, a health maintenance organization that contracts with the California Department of Health Care Services.