Google Cloud to Power Analytics With ‘Healthcare Data Engine’
Google Cloud has unveiled what it calls a “Healthcare Data Engine” to help health systems and life sciences organizations harmonize data from multiple sources, including medical records, claims, clinical trials, and research data to gain more holistic views of patient longitudinal records and enable advanced analytics in a scalable cloud environment.
Google said that Mayo Clinic has been working with Google Cloud to bring data in from disparate sources, harmonize it to FHIR format, and analyze it in BigQuery, a managed data warehouse Automating this process means what used to take weeks can be done in an hour, enabling Mayo Clinic’s experts to now focus on solving critical problems in health rather than managing IT resources, the company said. Lessons learned from this work have informed Healthcare Data Engine.
During a press briefing, Marianne Slight, a product manager for Google Health Analytics, said the new solution enables data harmonization across the different data sources. “What we see out in the market is that historically, organizations have relied on enterprise data warehouses on electronic health records, in order to do this kind of retrospective analytics,” she said. “But today's use cases need less data latency; they need to make faster sense of this growing, proliferating data. Some of the use cases that we see our customers focusing on are things like population health, where they need to be able to bring in data from patient wearables, as well as from their own clinical electronic health record systems; or health equity for screening patients, regardless of any social and demographic factors, along with decentralized clinical trials, so that that way while the patient is still in front of the provider, that provider can be notified that the patient meets the criteria for a clinical trial.”
Describing what she called key differentiators with Healthcare Data Engine, Slight said Google Cloud understands healthcare formats, healthcare languages fluently. “So out of the box, Healthcare Data Engine can map more than 90 percent of HL7 version 2 messages to FHIR across all the leading electronic health record systems,” she said. “And what that means is it gets customers up to speed up and running very, very quickly. And it reduces the cost of maintenance on an ongoing basis. We understand healthcare data formats, and healthcare data mapping and reconciliation natively.”
She noted that Vish Anantraman, M.D., the chief technology officer at Mayo Clinic, has described the importance of being able to bring the data into a secure environment in a standard way. “Data is the fuel that you need for that innovation. And so with Healthcare Data Engine, we're helping our customers do that innovation by providing the ability for them to scale and use their data for analytics and AI, even across all the different sources and different schemas and different formats.”
Healthcare Data Engine is now available in private preview, the company said, and is already being used by healthcare organizations such as Indiana University Health.
