Toby Cosgrove, former CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, now an advisor to Google's cloud business

Toby Cosgrove has a new job.

After decades running one of the world's most famous hospitals, Cleveland Clinic, he's helping one of Silicon Valley's most prominent technology companies figure out how to sell its technology and services into health care.

Cosgrove announced earlier this year that he's taking a position at Google as an advisor to the Google Cloud health care and life sciences team.

Surprisingly, he's not fighting to win large cloud contracts at the largest hospitals.

That's because most hospitals have already invested hundreds of millions of dollars into on-premises IT systems from companies like Epic Systems and Cerner, including installation, upgrades and training. At Cleveland Clinic, for instance, Cosgrove was one of the first big customers to invest in Epic Systems' electronic medical record software.

Cosgrove doesn't see these companies moving their entire infrastructures to a hosted cloud system like Google Cloud, or the more popular rival products from Amazon and Microsoft.

Instead, he wants to figure out what kinds of apps can be built on top of these systems to help hospitals start to modernize.

In his view, the "killer application" for health care is voice for applications like transcribing physicians' medical notes, which leverage technologies like machine learning and natural language processing. (Cosgrove isn't involved, but another Alphabet team, Google Brain, is looking at doing just that).

Cosgrove thinks it'll take time before hospitals and smaller clinics across the country are using voice technology as a mainstream application, whether it's from Google or an enterprising start-up.

"I think it's going have to be specialty by specialty and probably the hardest is going to be the primary care physician because they have to see everything that comes through the door," said Cosgrove.