Health IT, Hospitals

What are the sources behind Google’s health information effort?

Google shared a few more details on its efforts to bring more accurate, reliable medical […]

Google shared a few more details on its efforts to bring more accurate, reliable medical information online, detailing some of its main sources and partners.

In addition to the Mayo Clinic, other key partners on the effort include Lumiata and VoxHealth. To what extent those two companies are involved is not entirely known, other than Google being impressed with their efforts.

“Google often works with third parties to help assure coverage and quality in our Knowledge Graph,” a spokesman told MedCity News in an email. “We worked with these partners because they’ve done excellent work in thinking of the medical space from a data, and a graph, perspective (i.e., what the facts are and also how you relate them all to each other).”

While not comprehensive, Google lists the following websites and government agencies as some of the main sources:

— ScienceDirect
— MedScape
— Nature
— Mayo Clinic, which essentially signs off on the veracity of information
— WebMD
— National Institutes on Health (NIH)
— National Library of Medicine (NLM)
— Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
— National Cancer Institute (NCI)
— Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
— ClinicalTrials.gov

“We use a combination of algorithms and medical professionals to create this medical information,” Google said in a blog post. “First, our algorithms find and analyze health-related information from high-quality sites across the web. Then, teams of doctors carefully review and refine the information and licensed medical illustrators create the visuals.”

Google’s effort on healthcare information comes from the application of its Knowledge Graph, which has been used to add a basic information box on celebrities and other topics. For the health information, many entries will be accompanied by a medical illustration depicting some of the 400 most-commonly searched ailments. The illustrators are:

— Cassio Lynm
— Suman Kasturia
— Catherine Delphia
— Molly Borman-Pullen
— Laurie O’Keefe
— Christy Krames
— Michele Graham

An average of 11.1 doctors have reviewed the information. One in 20 of all Google searches are health-related, the company said, and the initial effort in the U.S. represents about 10 percent of such searches.

Google Product manager Prem Ramaswami told MedCity News on Monday that the company may alter its search algorithm specifically around health information sometime in the future.

Shares0
Shares0