How Healthcare is Going Google

In today’s age of Digital Transformation, healthcare organizations are increasingly looking to move their data to the cloud. It wasn’t always this way – pre-pandemic, healthcare systems had their reservations about migrating organizational and patient data into Google Cloud. What if the transition requires too much effort? Can we trust Google with our data? How is patient data kept safe? Does it meet compliance? Is it even cumulus? All valid questions many asked as they watched others adopt this digital puff from afar.

With the utilization of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), analytics, and other technologies, Google believes a better future can be unlocked for health globally. Their teams are creating innovative tech that’s providing deeper insights for consumers, caregivers, and communities while eliminating health disparities. Google is accelerating their healthcare-focused initiatives, and with three recent societal shift, Google Cloud says now is the pivotal moment for health systems to steer themselves towards digital health and transformation. First, the pandemic forever changed the expectations of healthcare consumers; second, the last several years have been plagued with rising staff shortages and burnout; and third, the population has increased the use of technology, telehealth, and health-focused wearable devices.

Healthcare is one of the world’s largest and most complex industries that’s striving for transformation and renewed operational effectiveness with the help of tech. But in order for tech to improve the health of billions of people, it needs to be created and implemented with intention that puts the experience of patients and providers first.

How Healthcare Organizations Are Benefiting from Google Cloud

In 2022 alone, Google made momentous headway in ensuring the industry’s pain points are considered and that the ease of digital transformation can be met. By partnering with several leading tech companies and health systems, they’ve created tools that can improve the accuracy of a diagnosis, advance clinical search functionalities, combine sets of medical data to view patients holistically, and ultimately provide better and equal care. And by incorporating these tools and systems to the Cloud, health systems can:

• Turn their data into usable insights about patient care, operational efficiencies, finances, and more
• Process large amounts of data faster and more efficiently
• Access AI and ML capabilities that can be applied clinically
• Reach optimal data interoperability
• Create better collaboration and connection with colleagues and patients

The Medical Imaging Suite, recently announced by Google Cloud, is a new industry solution that increases the accessibility, interoperability, and usefulness of medical images. Pioneers of AI/ML, Google’s newest suite implements these technologies to address common industry pain points and includes components such as HIPAA compliant imaging storage, AI-assisted image annotation tools, BigQuery and Looker datasets and dashboards, imaging AI pipelines, and secure imaging deployment. Hackensack Meridian Health is adopting the Medical Imaging Suite to de-identify petabytes of images and plans to utilize future AI algorithms to predict metastasis in patients with prostate cancer. Hologic, a tech company that developed the first CE-marked platform that aids cytologists and pathologists in identifying cancer, is expanding their platform to also include the Medical Imaging Suite.

Google Cloud’s Healthcare API, a tool that enables the exchange of data between healthcare applications and solutions built on Google Cloud, allows health systems to have a unified view of their patient data. Cloud Healthcare API has a secure and scalable infrastructure that also supports healthcare data standards like HL7, HL7 v2, FHIR, and DICOM. Interoperability has been a long-standing challenge in healthcare due to siloed systems – in our current healthcare environment, having access to real-time, actionable data is lifesaving. Built on the core capabilities of Cloud Healthcare API, Google Cloud Healthcare Data Engine enables interoperable, longitudinal records of patient data and offers advanced analytics in a scalable, secure, and HIPAA compliant environment. Three new Healthcare Data Engine accelerators have also been announced recently, promising to improve health equity, patient flow, and quality of care.

Google Cloud’s Healthcare Data Engine Accelerators for 2023

During the HLTH 2022 Conference – where thousands of healthcare leaders, providers, patients, and industry professionals came together– Google Cloud announced the emergence of three new Healthcare Data Engine (HDE) accelerators. These accelerators were developed alongside Hackensack Meridian Health, Lifepoint Health, Mayo Clinic, and other industry leading Google partners, to address pain points and help organizations quickly reinvent and enable lifesaving data unification and interoperability.

Available in early 2023, these accelerators are said to solve common industry challenges by addressing health equity, patient flow, and value-based care while supporting their digital transformations. By leveraging Google Cloud’s infrastructure, each customer is ensured to have their organization’s and patient’s data protected, secure, and private while supporting HIPAA compliance. They will also include custom infrastructure deployment configurations, BigQuery data models, and Looker dashboard templates. Healthcare organizations utilizing these HDE accelerators will gain patient record insights and will be able to perform analytics in real time.

• Health Equity
  Health equity will be supported by one of the HDE accelerators through utilizing tools leveraging data that’s tied to social determinants of health (SDOH). Building upon traditional forecasting tools, this HDE accelerator will also include SDOH, Health Level Seven (HL7), and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data to create longitudinal patient records. This will allow organizations to achieve higher levels of patient health by connecting patients to the community, overcoming economic and social obstacles within healthcare.
   
• Patient Flow
  Navigating the operations of clinic and hospital systems is becoming increasingly frustrating for patients – add to that the challenges of employee burnout and staffing shortages, your results become costly operational inefficiencies and negative patient experiences. By focusing on patient flow, this accelerator will provide visualizations and data to allow healthcare systems to better understand their patient flow metrics and identify woeful trends and bottlenecks. Organizations can use these insights to create operational performance initiatives, provide ongoing performance data, and improve experiences for both patients and staff.
  
  
• Quality of Care
  Value-based care is a promising healthcare delivery model where providers – including hospitals, doctors, nurses, and labs – receive pay based on the quality of care they gave, not the quantity. In order to successfully deliver value-based care, organizations need to not only adopt a team-oriented approach, but they need to assess care quality and outcomes through an interoperable, data-driven approach that drives critical insights and analytics. This HDE accelerator is set to support organizations in identifying key population health metrics and analyzing data trends by uniting claims and clinical data.

An ‘Epic’ Move

Also announced during the HLTH 2022 conference, Epic – a leading electronic health record (EHR) software company – has made an agreement with Google Cloud to allow healthcare systems to migrate their EHRs to the cloud. This will be a first for the migration of EHR data into the Cloud and Hackensack Meridian Health, Google’s HDE accelerator partner, and Divurgent client, will be the first healthcare system to do so. EHRs are a critical component of a health system’s ecosystem, and by migrating their Epic EHR to Google Cloud, they will be able to faster and more efficiently innovate while benefiting from a secure cloud environment. Their IT and developers will also be enabled to focus more on discovering better ways to improve patient care. During this migration, the Hackensack team will be working with Google to create integration phases until the project is complete – a date that is currently undisclosed.

On Divurgent’s ‘The Vurge’ podcast, Mark Eimer, SVP, Associate CIO, and Chief Technology Officer at Hackensack Meridian Health, shared that they hope to have their entire health system running on Google by the end of 2023. Not only will Hackensack directly benefit from a full Google Cloud integration, but their patients will benefit as well. With digital experiences also accessible via Google Cloud, like remote patient monitoring and home-based care, the digital journey and experience of patients will become seamless, enriching their engagement and satisfaction while nurturing a healthier life.