During the past 18 months, the global health ecosystem has adopted digital health technology at a pace that was unimaginable before the pandemic. Telehealth is now connecting more patients with caregivers than ever. AI modeling is speeding up innovation and enabling physicians to deliver better care. And stronger data portability is helping enable greater vaccine availability and equitable access to those who need it.

During a HIMSS21 Digital session on Monday, HIMSS CEO Hal Wolf spoke with Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, about how data-driven innovations seen during the pandemic will continue to move the healthcare industry forward in ways both large and small.

Ultimately, Kurian believes that the greatest opportunities for data-driven technology to transform health and wellness fall into three main categories:

1. Providing continuous care. The idea is that providers can get better insights on what patients are facing and deliver better care by being continuously connected with the patient, not just when they are at the hospital. Google Cloud's work in this area involves their consumer devices (such as Fitbit), as well as building solutions with partners (as in using Nest cameras to assist healthcare workers at Mt. Sinai Hospital).

2. Enabling doctors to provide better care to patients. Google Cloud's new Health Care Data Engine allows practitioners to make operational decisions using real-time data from clinical and other systems.

"With hospitals, the best thing we can do is provide doctors with a much more unified view of the information of the person they are dealing with," said Kurian. "So we are building this notion of a longitudinal patient record to unify info from EHR systems, from other sources, from the clinical trial system, their genetic system, to get a better view of the person and deliver better care."

3. Fostering greater efficiency. Kurian points out that the more efficient the healthcare system becomes, the more it can invest back in patient care, new forms of treatment and drug discovery. Thus, initiatives to apply machine learning tools can improve the ability for payers to offer value-based care and empower therapeutics companies to speed up the drug discovery process

In Kurian's view, data will be fundamental in moving us all forward in healthcare. "Our view is that unlocking the value from data is the next boundary in improving health care," he said. "Look back at when the microscope came along. It allowed doctors to find things and identify diseases they could never see before. Unlocking the value from data is like providing a new kind of microscope."