Google Cloud this week announced a new agreement with Epic, with the two IT giants working together to help health systems move clinical data to the cloud. A major Epic customer, Hackensack Meridian Health, says it plans to move its electronic health record workloads to a hosted environment.

WHY IT MATTERS
The goal is faster innovations, greater clinical efficiencies and more robust information security, according to Hackensack Meridian.

"We expect running Epic on Google Cloud will be simpler for our IT and developers,  and will allow them to focus more on uncovering creative ways to improve patient care," Kash Patel, the New Jersey health system's chief digital information officer, said in a statement.

"Having everything with Google Cloud will provide a huge opportunity for discoveries," he said. "For example, data from our AI Avatar for natural language processing will already be in Google Cloud, ready for us to ask questions. This will speed up our work and make information more accessible."

THE LARGER TREND
Epic workloads have been trending cloudward at several major health systems in recent years. In July 2021, Wellforce, now known as Tufts Medicine, announced plans to migrate its Epic infrastructure to AWS. By the following May, the health system touted success in moving 40-plus disparate applications and its Epic EHR to the cloud.

Google, meanwhile, has been working with other EHR vendors for some time. In 2019, Meditech announced its Expanse platform will be made available via Google Cloud, and the company has since integrated Google's search and summarization tools into its EHR.

Concurrent with its Epic announcement (which represents something of an about-face for the Verona, Wisconsin, EHR giant), Google Cloud also announced another project this week with Hackensack Meridian – as well as Lifepoint Health and other healthcare organizations: Healthcare Data Engine accelerators to help providers manage cases around health equity, patient flow and value-based care.

The HDE accelerators, scheduled to launch in 2023, offer infrastructure deployment configurations, BigQuery data models, and Looker dashboard templates to support healthcare organizations as they tackle these fundamental challenges.

"These accelerators, developed collaboratively with healthcare organizations, will solve a range of industry pain points, and they will unlock the truly transformative power of interoperable longitudinal patient records," Aashima Gupta, global director of Google Cloud's Healthcare Strategy and Solutions, said in a statement.

ON THE RECORD
"Hackensack Meridian Health is leading on two of the big transformations underway across this industry: building a secure foundation for digital infrastructure, and putting data and AI to work for the patient," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a statement about that health system's Epic migration.

"Our mission to innovate requires accessible, cutting-edge technology," added Hackensack Meridian CEO Robert C. Garrett. "With our Epic EHR on Google Cloud, we'll be able to innovate faster, and benefit from a more efficient and secure cloud environment."

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Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.