Source: www.forbes.com
Over the years, Google has proven to be a relentless force pertaining to innovation. The company continues to find new ways to provide value to billions of people worldwide. Its latest venture is leveraging its Care Studio platform to build new partnerships and create value in the healthcare space. The platform applies the classic Google narrative to healthcare: integrating robust search features, making information digestible, and organizing data in more useful ways.
As the company describes it, Care Studio “leans on Google’s expertise in organizing information to help clinicians find health record information faster. The tool’s Clinical Search feature enables clinicians to simply type what they’re looking for and quickly find the specific information requested, and even related concepts […] Our tools give clinicians a single, centralized view that automatically brings forward a patient’s important information — including hospital visits, outpatient events, laboratory tests, medications, and treatment and progress notes. And the intuitive interface offers unique ways to visualize health data and trends in tables, graphs and other helpful formats.”
The company has painstakingly developed the platform in order to specifically address the obstacles that many current healthcare IT systems face. Now, it is slowly ready to use this system to build new parternships. At the famous Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference last week, Google announced its intention to partner with MEDITECH, a healthcare IT giant and prominent electronic health records (EHR) systems pioneer.
The press release explains: “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.”
Indeed, this one-of-a-kind partnership is certainly a promising milestone for Google. Although Google has already forged strong relationships with numerous healthcare companies through various other verticals (e.g. cloud, data science, services, etc.), the company is relatively young in its EHR and health IT related ventures. Google’s partnership with a large company like MEDITECH signals a level of product maturity, indicating that the company is getting ready to scale its platform to new frontiers.
MEDITECH is a widely used platform, serving some of the largest healthcare organizations across the globe. As Google enters this realm, the possibilities are endless. Take for example Epic, another healthcare IT company that has exponentially grown its presence in the health sector over the last decade. Epic’s EHR system is used by healthcare organizations worldwide and is ripe for collaboration with partners such as Google.
Of course, the pipeline for Google’s product is still to be determined. Experts are questioning whether the company will eventually aim to launch the Care Studio product as a stand-alone EHR platform that can compete with other established systems, or rather, continue to partner with existing players as it is doing right now. Time will tell. Nevertheless, as Google has proven time and again, disruption is just around the corner. Certainly, healthcare IT is ripe for change, and Google will undoubtedly have a significant role to play in the years to come.
