Google Cloud Launches New ‘Accelerators’ to Help Healthcare Companies Improve Health Equity, Patient Flow, and Value-Based Care

Collaboration with Hackensack Meridian Health, Lifepoint Health and others will help organizations run more effectively and improve patient care

Today at HLTH 2022, Google Cloud announced three new Healthcare Data Engine (HDE) accelerators—developed in collaboration with Hackensack Meridian Health, Lifepoint Health, and others—that help organizations address common use cases around health equity, patient flow, and value-based care.

Frequently, the information healthcare leaders and administrators need is siloed and isn’t easy to access. It may be buried deep in the patient record or spread across IT systems that don’t speak to each other. Improving the flow and unification of data across health care systems, referred to as interoperability, is critical to helping organizations run more effectively, improving patient care and enabling people to live healthier lives.

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. HDE leverages Google Cloud’s reliable infrastructure and secure data storage that support HIPAA compliance, and when implemented, each customer’s layers of security, privacy controls and processes protect the access and use of patient data.

“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. “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.”

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“Google Cloud develops new tools to help healthcare organizations with health equity, patient flow, and value-based care.”

“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. “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. Lifepoint is proud to partner with Google Cloud and bring the best of Silicon Valley to communities of all sizes across the United States.”

Strengthening health equity
To help everyone achieve their highest levels of health, organizations must overcome economic, social, and other obstacles to healthcare, and eliminate preventable health disparities. One of the new HDE accelerators will support health equity, providing tools to enable healthcare organizations to connect patients to community resources; support work with analytics; and dashboards to help organizations leverage social determinants of health (SDOH) datasets, and more. Traditional forecasting tools lack social determinants of health, and this accelerator will include SDOH, along with Health Level Seven (HL7) and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data for longitudinal patient records.

“We applaud Google for its innovation around privacy and security, and its ongoing commitment to the Healthcare API and innovation,” said Cris Ross, chief information officer at Mayo Clinic. “These healthcare accelerators will be important tools for our scientists and innovators to reduce health disparities and inequity.”

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Reinventing operations and experiences
Patients are increasingly frustrated with navigating appointments and wait times, and inefficiencies can cost organizations time and money to manage. Staffing shortages and employee burnout remain a major challenge in healthcare. Driving efficiencies in this area can help healthcare workers improve patient experiences and care. The HDE accelerator focused on patient flow provides aggregate data and visualizations to help health systems understand a broad range of patient flow metrics to surface trends, potential drivers, and bottlenecks to help inform clinical operations performance initiatives.

Improving quality of care
Value-based care is an emerging alternative to fee-for-service reimbursements, that ties payments to the quality of care provided. In order to deliver value-based care, organizations need to have access to the right data to assess quality and outcomes, and data interoperability is critical to make that data useful for analytics and insights. The HDE accelerator targeting value-based care will 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, FACHE, and chief executive officer for Hackensack Meridian Health. “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.”

“Interoperability is at the heart of Highmark Health’s Living Health strategy and we intend to leverage our blended structure of payor and provider to deliver a differentiated health experience for our patients and members,” said Richard Clarke, chief data and analytics officer, Highmark Health. “Healthcare Data Engine is a central component to enabling that strategy and we are excited about the new accelerators being announced today as they will speed up time-to-value for our members.”

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