HCA Healthcare, Google Partner on Creation of New Data Analytics Platform

The Nashville-based HCA Healthcare and Google Cloud have announced a multi-year strategic partnership in which the organizations will build a data analytics platform leveraging information from the health system’s 32 million annual patient encounters.

Officials noted in the announcement that HCA Healthcare uses information from its all these encounters to identify opportunities to improve clinical care and support its 93,000 nurses and 47,000 active and affiliated physicians. They point out that HCA Healthcare has published studies in medical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, “developed algorithm-informed decision support tools for caregivers, and identified clinical practices that reduce infections and improve perinatal care.”

Now, this partnership with Google Cloud “is expected to enhance efforts by HCA Healthcare to continue to improve and develop new advanced decision support to promote quality, safety, and efficiency,” they stated.

As part of the effort, HCA Healthcare has deployed 90,000 mobile devices that run tools created by the organization’s PatientKeeper and Mobile Heartbeat teams and other developers, designed to empower caregivers as they work. In combination with these investments, the partnership with Google Cloud is expected to help physicians, nurses and others with workflow tools, analysis and alerts on their mobile devices to help clinicians respond quickly to changes in a patient’s condition. The partnership will also focus on impacting non-clinical support areas that may benefit from improved workflows through better use of data and insights, such as supply chain, human resources and physical plant operations, among others, officials said.

“Next-generation care demands data science-informed decision support so we can more sharply focus on safe, efficient and effective patient care,” Sam Hazen, CEO of HCA Healthcare, said in a statement. “We view partnerships with leading organizations, like Google Cloud, that share our passion for innovation and continual improvement as foundational to our efforts.”

The partnership will also utilize Google Cloud’s healthcare data offerings, including the Google Cloud Healthcare API and BigQuery, a planetary-scale database with full support for HL7v2 and FHIRv4 data standards, as well as HIPAA compliance, officials explained.

“The cloud can be an accelerant for innovation in health, particularly in driving data interoperability, which is critical in streamlining operations and providing better quality of care to improve patient outcomes,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. “We are honored to partner with HCA Healthcare on this unique opportunity to be at the forefront of advancing care through the power of real-time data availability to support clinical and operational workflows.”

Google has previously worked with health systems on projects that enabled the tech giant to analyze patient data. In 2019, stakeholders expressed patient privacy concerns when Google and Ascension—the largest nonprofit health system in the U.S.—said they were working on an initiative that would mine health data for millions of Ascension patients, with the goal to develop a search tool for patient information. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that neither patients nor doctors had been notified about this initiative, but both Google and Ascension attested that their work is compliant under federal law.

Jonathan Perlin, M.D., chief medical officer of HCA, told the WSJ this week that “HCA patient records would be stripped of identifying information before being shared with Google data scientists and that the hospital system would control access to the data.”

In its announcement, the two organizations said that “privacy and security will be guiding principles throughout this partnership. The access and use of patient data will be addressed through the implementation of Google Cloud’s infrastructure along with HCA Healthcare’s layers of security controls and processes.”

Nonetheless, Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., a medical ethics professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told CNBC this week that he believes privacy laws in the U.S. need to be updated, particularly after Google struck this deal. Caplan told CNBC television host Shepard Smith that he “was concerned that a company like Google, which does a lot of commercial advertising, could correlate the information coming out of the healthcare system and potentially sell it,” according to the network. “Maybe they don’t have your name, but they sure enough can figure out what sub-group, sub-population might do best by getting advertised to you,” Caplan said, per CNBC.