In 2021 Google Cloud unveiled what it calls a “Healthcare Data Engine (HDE)” to help health systems and life sciences organizations harmonize data from multiple sources for analytics purposes.
At the time Mayo Clinic had been working with Google Cloud to bring data together from disparate sources, harmonize it to FHIR format, and analyze it in BigQuery, a managed data warehouse. Automating this process means that what used to take weeks can be done in an hour, enabling Mayo Clinic’s experts to focus on solving critical problems in health rather than managing IT resources, the company said. Lessons learned from this work have informed the Healthcare Data Engine concept.
Now Google Cloud has announced three HDE accelerators—developed in collaboration with Hackensack Meridian Health, Lifepoint Health, and others—that it says will help organizations address common use cases around health equity, patient flow, and value-based care.
Available in early 2023, the HDE accelerators offer tailored infrastructure deployment configurations, BigQuery data models, and Looker dashboard templates to support adoption and time-to-value of HDE for these common industry 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," said Aashima Gupta, global director of Google Cloud's Healthcare Strategy and Solutions, in a statement. "The kind of transformation needed in healthcare can be daunting and slow, but an incremental, use case-based approach breaks apart these challenges into manageable solutions that capture specific business opportunities and drive innovation."
"Google Cloud's solution-oriented approach brings the best of technology and healthcare together to help improve quality, increase access and ensure equitable care for patients no matter where they live," said Jessica Beegle, senior vice president and chief innovation officer of Lifepoint Health, in a statement. "Instead of giving us building blocks that need to be assembled, they are delivering custom-built solutions to help us efficiently tackle key problems in our markets and provide more useful data for our clinical teams to take better care of their patients.”
Nashville-based Lifepoint Health’s network has 62 community hospital campuses, more than 30 rehabilitation and behavioral health hospitals and 170 additional sites of care.
The HDE accelerator targeting value-based care is designed to help organizations analyze trends and identify key population health metrics from combining claims and clinical data.
"Promoting health equity and human dignity to improve the health of our communities is a fundamental priority for our network," said Robert C. Garrett, chief executive officer for New Jersey-based Hackensack Meridian Health, in a statement. "This latest development from our partnership with Google Cloud will enable us to delve deeper into value-based care and accelerate the strides our research teams are making in these areas."
Hackensack Meridian Health also announced it plans to move its Epic workloads to Google Cloud, with the aim to drive greater innovation, efficiencies, and security. Meanwhile, Google Cloud said its agreement with Epic will give healthcare organizations more choices for their cloud environments. "With our Epic EHR on Google Cloud, we'll be able to innovate faster, and benefit from a more efficient and secure cloud environment,” Garrett added.
