Larry Brilliant writes in Slate about Google’s work to come to terms with the direction of its philanthropic giving. Google.org, the relatively new face of this effort, will be funded with 1 percent of Google’s equity and profits in some form, as well as employee time — thus its ‘hybrid’ nature. Brilliant says Google asked three broad questions: 1) Where can Google work to help the poorest and weakest of the world? 2) Is it a big enough idea? and 3) Did Google have particular expertise for each potential project?

Five initiatives were decided upon all with strong health implications. They are, according to Brilliant:

Predict and Prevent: We plan to identify hot spots where there is a high risk of emerging threats, such as infectious disease or climate risk, and enable a rapid, coordinated response.

Inform and Empower to Improve Public Services: Our goal is to use information to help spur citizens, communities, providers, and policymakers to improve the delivery of essential public services such as education, health, water, and sanitation.

Fuel the Growth of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: As described above, we want to increase the flow of risk capital to small and medium-sized businesses in the developing world.

Develop Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal (RE<C): Our goal is to create utility-scale electricity from clean renewable energy sources that is cheaper than electricity produced from coal.

Accelerate the Commercialization of Plug-In Vehicles (RechargeIT): We want to plant the seeds for innovation, demonstrate vehicle electrification and vehicle-to-grid technology, inform the policy debate, and stimulate market demand to foster mass commercialization of electric vehicles.

Google’s Predict and Prevent initiative, in particular, seeks to improve the “vulnerability mapping” of disease “hot spots” and create systems to detect threats better enabling early warning and a rapid response. The development of a wiki early warning capability for pandemics, a concept Brilliant has discussed before, is certainly a fantastic match for the resources and talent that Google can bring to the global health table.

The ‘hybrid’ flexibility embedded in these new philanthropic programs is a typically smart and innovative — as well as bold– Google move. Let’s hope that people like Brilliant can put this together in a way that has a real global impact on health care.