Google Cloud Previewing Data Engine for Health Care

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Google Cloud is sharing a private “preview” of its data engine for health care to enable greater data interoperability in the industry.

Google Cloud’s Healthcare Data Engine is an end-to-end solution for health care and life sciences organizations to “harmonize” data from multiple sources, including medical records, claims, clinical trials, and research data, according to the company last month.

Healthcare Data Engine was developed to give operational leaders, researchers, and clinicians real-time, interoperable, and “holistic views” of patient longitudinal records and enable advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) in a “secure, compliant, and scalable” cloud environment. 

The product is intended to help health care and life sciences organizations make “better real-time decisions”: around resource utilization, optimizing clinical trials, accelerating research, identifying high-risk patients, reducing physician burn out, and more.

Nearly nine out of 10 physicians (87%) said data interoperability should be a priority at their health care organizations, according to recent Google Cloud-commissioned research conducted by The Harris Poll. 

Almost all physicians (95%) agreed that access to more complete patient records helps them make diagnoses more quickly and accurately. Most physicians (90%) also said they would be able to provide more personalized care for patients if they could reduce time reviewing or updating patient records by 5%. 

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Healthcare Data Engine builds on and extends the core capability of the Google Cloud Healthcare API. The product makes health care data more useful by providing clinical insights in the FHIR format, the health care industry standard. 

For example, Healthcare Data Engine can map more than 90% of HL7v2 messages to FHIR — such as medication orders or patient updates — across leading EHRs, according to Google. The mapping helps customers get up and running and avoids custom tooling or services to translate between data schemas. 

The product also uses Google BigQuery’s analytics and AI to allow health organizations to process and visualize petabytes of their patient data to get a broad view of patients in their surrounding communities and improve overall population health.

“As we are keenly aware from the pandemic, access to the right information at the right time, is critical to saving lives,” said Dr. Joe Corkery, director of product management, Google Cloud. 

“We built Healthcare Data Engine to make it easier for health care and life sciences organizations to bring together their data silos to innovate and improve health outcomes.”

The Indiana University Health and Mayo Clinic are two early users of the data engine. 

“We were hitting a wall with our ability to innovate on-prem,” said Jim Buntrock, vice chair of information technology, Mayo Clinic. 

“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. … We’re working alongside Google Cloud to build a platform for health care transformation.”

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