Google’s search capability is ubiquitous. Now Google Health, the health information products and services branch of Alphabet, aims to bring its search and summarization capabilities to the world of EHRs.
On Tuesday, at the HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition in Orlando, Google Health and EHR vendor Meditech announced a collaboration that they believe can provide a more complete picture of patients for providers. Later, in separate interviews executives from both companies explained the rationale for the collaboration.
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The goal is to help clinicians provide the best care through quick and easy access to information across care settings. That includes information that is outside the patient’s record, company officials said.
Meditech solutions span every care setting, from hospitals and outpatient practices, to home health and hospice, long-term care and behavioral health facilities, according to the company. But still some patient data — from a test they had done to information about medical conditions — can be left out of patient records. And different providers may use different software, and because systems are incompatible, not have access to all the patient information they need. The collaboration aims to change that.
Meditech is exploring how it can leverage Google Health’s search capabilities to bring together data from multiple patient records in disparate care settings to help health providers get a more comprehensive view of patients.
“In a meaningful way that gets presented to the clinician when they need it without a care gap, so you’re able to see the full story,” said Christine Parent, associate vice president of marketing at Meditech, in a sit-down interview at HIMSS22.
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“It’s not all about everyone being on the same system,” added Jason Patnode, the company’s manager of marketing , who also took part in the interview.
That’s not always possible, he said.
Google Health extracts information from different patient records to produce a summary of a patient’s health conditions, according to the company. Clinicians can then access in-depth critical information related to treating and monitoring a patient’s medical conditions, including lab results, vitals and medications.
“Meditech obviously has been at the forefront both in terms of interoperability (and) helping clinicians have the best possible experiences,” said Paul Muret, vice president and general manager of Google Health’s Care Studio, who also provided details on the companies’ plans for collaboration at HIMSS22. That includes “really simplifying the care process, so that clinicians can spend more time with their patients and less time in front of the computer,” he said,
The Care Studio’s technology is designed to make it easier for clinicians to find critical patient information.
Medical records get really complex, Muret noted, so simply aggregating more data alone doesn’t necessarily provide the clarity doctors need to improve patient care.
“How do we bring Google’s capabilities – in organizing and making information really accessible – to this picture? That’s where search comes in,” he said. “We’ve now unpacked and reorganized all the information across systems. And now we got a medically tuned search engine on top of that.”
So if you want to find out if a patient has ever had a medication before or learn everything about their hypertension, this allows health providers to search a patient’s combined medical record across EHRs, to do just that.
Parent emphasized that Meditech has a long history of taking into account the patient’s longitudinal data — information that’s gathered over time and across care settings — to provide clinicians a comprehensive view. The company’s planned collaboration with Google Health will build on that, she said, with an aim of improving patient outcomes.
Both Meditech’s Expanse platform and Google Health’s clinical tools adhere to privacy laws and are designed to meet industry best practices to protect sensitive patient data, according to the companies.
Photo: Filograph, Getty Images
