Google Cloud on Thursday unveiled its new Healthcare Data Engine, which it says is designed to give researchers and clinicians a more real-time, holistic view of patient records.

WHY IT MATTERS
The goal is to enable more advanced analytics and artificial intelligence applications built in a secure and scalable cloud environment – helping healthcare and life sciences organizations harmonize data from sources such as electronic health records, claims data and clinical trials results.

Healthcare Data Engine is built with the Google Cloud Healthcare API, helping provide longitudinal clinical insights in FHIR format. It can map more than 90% of HL7v2 messages – medication orders, patient updates – to FHIR across leading EHRs out-of-the-box, according to the company, eliminating the need to create custom tooling or services to translate between data schemas.

The platform also uses Google BigQuery's AI-powered analytics, helping healthcare organizations process and visualize petabytes of their data. The aim is to enable faster decision-making not just for clinical decision support and population health management but around resource utilization, clinical trial optimization, risk stratification, burnout reduction, research innovation and more.

Google Cloud partner Mayo Clinic has already been working with the technology for data aggregation, FHIR harmonization and analytics. Healthcare Data Engine is also already in use at Indiana University Health.

"We were hitting a wall with our ability to innovate on-prem," said Jim Buntrock, vice chair of IT at Mayo Clinic, in a statement. "By moving to the cloud we're able to build tools more easily, at scale, in a way that takes advantage of technological advancements in security and privacy to remain at the forefront in data protection."

"There are so many applications of this. For example, building a 'heads up display' for the ICU – where moments matter – to help care teams direct their attention when and where it's needed most," said Buntrock. "From creating better ways to care for patients remotely even after they leave the hospital to making it easier for patients to interact with us via mobile app, we're working alongside Google Cloud to build a platform for healthcare transformation."

The platform is now available in private preview, according to Google Cloud, with implementation partners Deloitte, Maven Wave, Quantiphi, and SADA available to help organizations deploy it at scale, and ISV partners such as Mathematica working to develop and deploy new apps that can be integrated with the data engine.

THE LARGER TREND
Earlier this week, Google Cloud published research from a poll of physicians that found widespread support for improved interoperability, with 96% saying efforts to enable access to needed clinical data will help improve patient safety and could help save lives.

The clinicians surveyed say they have an appetite to provide "more personalized care with increased operational efficiency," said Dr. Joe Corkery, director of product management for healthcare and life sciences at Google Cloud.

"More than 9 in 10 physicians say the ability to efficiently incorporate patient data into care plans is critical to care coordination (91%), and the use of inefficient electronic health records systems (which require excessive scrolling, pop-ups, manual data entry, etc.) has had a negative impact on their ability to deliver quality care (92%)," he said. "Most physicians (90%) say if they could reduce the time they spend on reviewing/updating their patients’ healthcare records by 5%, they would be able to provide more personalized care."

ON THE RECORD
"As we are keenly aware from the pandemic, access to the right information, at the right time, is critical to saving lives," said Corkery in announcing the new interoperability platform. "We built Healthcare Data Engine to make it easier for healthcare and life sciences organizations to bring together their data silos to innovate and improve health outcomes."

Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
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