Healthcare & Life Sciences

HIMSS 2022: Improving health through data interoperability and natural language processing

March 10, 2022

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Joe Miles

JManaging Director, Global HCLS Industry Solutions, Google Cloud

The last two years have accelerated the healthcare and life sciences industry’s adoption of technology by tenfold. From the rapid speed of vaccine development to the adoption of telehealth, Healthcare now has an opportunity to build upon the advances and innovations of the past two years and deliver even greater patient care.

This week at the HIMSS Health IT Conference, we will discuss how Google Cloud customers are doing amazing things with their own data, the latest innovations in healthcare data interoperability, including our big bet on natural language processing (NLP).

Data drives everything

I will be joined by Aashima Gupta, Head of Google Cloud Healthcare Providers, in moderating a panel on Wednesday, March 16 at 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM EDT about how critical data interoperability is across healthcare – and how it will help us be more prepared for the next global healthcare crisis or effort.

Panelists Tim Tarnowski, CIO, IU Health, Cris Ross, CIO, Mayo Clinic and Brian Barrett, VP Information Delivery, Highmark Health will share their perspectives on lessons learned and visions around how we can achieve a more data-driven equitable healthcare for all. We’ll also walk through the steps healthcare organizations can take to move toward data interoperability. By tapping into easy-to-use technology that supports health information exchange, healthcare leaders can focus on what they do best: improving patient care.

At Google Cloud, we have been at the forefront of interoperability, pushing to digitize healthcare data that has been siloed for decades. It’s through innovations like Google Cloud’s Healthcare Data Engine and Cloud Healthcare API, that Healthcare organizations are gaining access to the technology needed to support the seamless and secure exchange of patient data.

NLP as the next frontier in healthcare

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are creating new opportunities for healthcare organizations to derive new insights from their data–whether it’s creating enhanced patient experiences, improving operations, or helping the physicians, nurses and administrators be more efficient.

We see NLP as the next frontier of AI/ML in healthcare, helping to extract insights from unstructured formats like clinical notes and lab results that impact clinical and operational workflows.

In a Lightning Session at HIMSS on Tuesday, March 15th 2:45pm-3:05pm EDT, we’ll discuss how healthcare providers, health plans, and pharma companies are increasingly using NLP to extract information from documents such as clinical notes and research publications to improve patient care. With Google Cloud’s Healthcare Natural Language API, healthcare organizations can better coordinate valuable medical insights that are captured in unstructured text that may be overlooked as patients move through their health journeys. The ultimate result is an improved experience and efficiencies- like lowering the likelihood of redundant bloodwork or other tests, reducing operational spending, and improving the patient-doctor experience.

Google’s big bet on NLP in healthcare spans beyond the cloud. In fact, last week, Google Health previewed Conditions, a new Care Studio feature that helps clinicians make even better sense of patient records using NLP. Healthcare data is complex, and clinicians often have to manually sift through information to make sense of a patient’s conditions. This new feature works by algorithmically understanding the actual context of medical concepts from notes that may be written in incomplete sentences, shorthand or with misspelled words, and mapping these concepts to a vocabulary of tens of thousands of medical conditions. That way, clinicians can instantly access the information they need all in one place to provide better care.

In addition to our sessions on NLP and data interoperability, we also invite you to join us at our additional sessions while at HIMSS where voices from across Google - including Fitbit, Google Health and Chrome will discuss the most interesting and pressing topic of Healthcare and Life Sciences: