Today at the HIMSS Conference in Orlando, Florida, we’re introducing a collaboration between Google Health and MEDITECH to jointly work on an integrated clinical solution. This partnership aims to combine our data harmonization, search and summarization capabilities from Google Health’s Care Studio product suite and integrate them into their electronic health record (EHR), MEDITECH Expanse.
Health information is complex — it’s often siloed or stored across different information systems and in different formats. As a result, it can be challenging for clinicians to find the information they need all in one place and quickly make sense of it to care for their patients.
Google Health’s Care Studio technology is designed to make it easier for clinicians to find critical patient information when they need it most. Built to adhere to strict privacy controls, Care Studio works alongside electronic health records (EHRs) to enhance existing workflows. Since we launched Care Studio, we’ve continued to hone our search capabilities for medical data, notes and scanned documents, and are using AI to help make sense of clinical information. We recently introduced our Conditions feature which summarizes a patient’s conditions and uses natural language processing to link to related information — like medications or lab results — so clinicians have the context they need to understand and assess a condition.
We’re proud of what we built with Care Studio thus far, and we know that partnering is fundamental to improving health outcomes at scale — no one product or company can overcome these obstacles alone.
Collaboration with the healthcare industry
MEDITECH has made significant commitments to advancing interoperability — a commitment we share. To best support clinicians, we need to fit into the way they work now. Collaborations with EHRs, like MEDITECH, will help us seamlessly integrate Google Health tools into existing clinical workflows, so we can help remove friction for clinicians.
With MEDITECH, we’re working on a deeply integrated solution to bring some of our data harmonization, search and summarization capabilities to their web-based EHR, MEDITECH Expanse. Using Google Health’s tools, MEDITECH will form a longitudinal health data layer, bringing together data from different sources into a standard format and offering clinicians a full view of patient records. And with Google Health’s search functionality embedded into their EHR, clinicians can find salient information faster for a more frictionless experience, and the intelligent summarization can highlight critical information directly in the Expanse workflow. This will help advance healthcare data interoperability, building on MEDITECH’s vision for a more connected ecosystem. Our collaboration expands on the partnership between MEDITECH and Google Cloud and will utilize Google Cloud’s infrastructure.
The healthcare industry is at an inflection point when it comes to interoperability. As COVID accelerated the need for interoperable systems, more organizations were eager to embrace Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) as the standard format for healthcare data. We’re using FHIR to support our data harmonization, yet there is more to be done before FHIR is widely adopted and systems can effectively exchange information. We’re hopeful that collaborative approaches, much like what we’re working on with MEDITECH, will help create more interoperable solutions and facilitate an open ecosystem of data interoperability that benefits everyone.
Upholding our privacy commitments
As we deepen our partnerships across the healthcare industry, privacy and security remain our top priorities. As with all our Google Health Care Studio partners, Google does not own or ever sell patient data, and patient data cannot be used for advertising. Our tools are designed to adhere to industry best practices and regulations, including HIPAA. Patient data is encrypted and isolated in a controlled access environment, separate from other Google customer data and consumer data.
Industry collaboration is a critical path to overcoming pervasive data fragmentation challenges. While we’re in the early stages with MEDITECH, this new collaboration marks an exciting step forward in creating a more open healthcare ecosystem and improving health outcomes.
Join us at HIMSS at 3:00 p.m. EST today, in room WF3 to learn more.
