Today at HIMSS22, Meditech and Google Health have announced their intent to collaborate on an integrated solution within Meditech's Expanse EHR platform.

The combined technology will enable the use of Google Health's search and summarization capabilities within the Expanse EHR with the aim of helping clinicians provide the best care through quick and easy access to information from multiple sources with a longitudinal view of a patient's health history.

Data in external systems and sources

Clinicians need access to a full view of patient information to provide the best care possible. But even with an integrated EHR like Expanse, Meditech said, some patient information still will reside in external systems and sources.

Meditech and Google Health said they are confident their combined effort will fill these gaps by pulling forward discrete information from legacy and disparate systems. The result is expected to be a more holistic, person-centered view of health encounters to drive more informed care delivery.

Integrated and medically tuned search capabilities can provide clinicians with a more frictionless experience by pulling forward the most salient clinical information to support their decisions, contributing to better patient outcomes, Meditech said.

Google Health's intelligent summarization extracts information from different parts of the patient record to produce a summary of a patient's health conditions. Clinicians then can explore a deep-dive view of critical information related to treating and monitoring said conditions, including lab results, vitals and medications.

Longitudinal health data layer

To enable this search and summary functionality, Meditech will use Google Health's tools to create a longitudinal health data layer, which will unite data from different sources and harmonize it into a standard FHIR format designed for clinician tools.

"This is the first step in a long-term collaboration between Meditech and Google Health," said Meditech Executive Vice President and COO Helen Waters. "Meditech has long focused on helping our customers achieve true integration across the care continuum.

"But we're also well aware that too much data can overburden clinicians, which is why we design our own solutions with personalized views of the most important information clinicians want to see," she continued. "Our partnership with Google Health builds upon this mission, providing us with a unique opportunity to combine our expertise to better solve the information burden our customers face."

By augmenting the power of Expanse with Google's search and summarization abilities, she added, Meditech is advancing interoperable healthcare data exchange, building an EHR platform for the future, and continuing the company's mission to propel data liquidity and support the future of digital health ecosystems.

Complementary areas of expertise

"Google Health and Meditech have a shared goal of supporting care teams with a complete view of the patient record," said Paul Muret, vice president and general manager of Care Studio at Google Health. "By combining our complementary areas of expertise, we can help health systems overcome challenges associated with data silos and enable care teams with the tools they need to provide the best possible care and outcomes for patients."

Meditech and Google Health's integrated search technology will start in an early pilot phase. The collaboration builds on a deep partnership between the EHR company and Google Cloud to deliver progressive EHR capabilities via cloud architecture.

Meditech is at HIMSS22 in Booth 3311 and Booth 8240-93. Google Cloud is in Booth MP193 and Booth MP195.

Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bsiwicki@himss.org
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