At Northwell Health, data interoperability and AI saves time and lives

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States and like any cancer, early detection is crucial to survival. Screening at-risk populations is an important part of reducing mortality, and if concerning nodules are found on imaging, further testing may be required. Today, we’ll share how Northwell Health uses Google Cloud products such as Cloud Healthcare APIs and BigQuery to increase caregiver productivity and deliver better care for patients with findings that indicate potential development of lung cancer.

Northwell is New York’s largest healthcare provider

Northwell Health is New York's largest healthcare provider with 23 hospitals and nearly 800 outpatient facilities. Northwell’s nearly 4,000 doctors care for millions of patients each year, and at this scale, there is an immense amount of healthcare data to manage. To better manage and leverage this data, Northwell Health partnered with Google Cloud starting in 2018.

Enabling caregivers to spend more time with patients

Nic Lorenzen, the lead developer of Northwell Emerging Technology and Innovation team, has a mission to put together data for caregivers in a way that makes sense. It is no secret that inefficient electronic health records systems have a negative impact on a physician's ability to deliver quality care. Traditional EHRs have information distributed across many tabs, which forces caregivers to spend considerable time at the computer trying to find information. Moreover, speed of care matters. If care is delayed, patients may have to spend more time in the hospital and may suffer worse health outcomes.

To solve this problem, Nic’s team focused on giving caregivers the most relevant pieces of data at the right time by developing an intelligent clinician rounding app. The data needed to derive these insights can depend on the caregiver’s role–a nurse cares about different things than a cardiologist. This system aggregates multiple data sources, and provides patient-specific insights to caregivers.

This system would not have been possible before with traditional EHRs and data warehouses that have proprietary data models and rarely sync data in real time. Now with data easily accessible through Google Cloud’s Healthcare solutions, Nic’s team can deliver the right clinical information to the right people instantly. These days, Nic says, “instead of spending 75% of our time dealing with architecting the underlying platforms, we spend 75% of our time focused on  higher value use cases for clinicians and patients. Google Cloud’s Healthcare solutions have greatly improved our developer productivity and time to value.”

Caregivers have found this new system to be a game changer.Before the implementation of this system, caregivers would spend, on average, seven to nine minutes finding the data needed to make medical decisions for one patient. Now, that aggregated information is delivered to a caregiver’s mobile device in less than a second.

Ensuring patients get the right care with the power of AI

There are a number of reasons why patients might not get the care that they need. For example, patients today can go to multiple hospitals and clinics settings, and coordinating care across multiple facilities is complex. Regional hospitals and clinics have their own siloed view of their data, so pertinent information gathered by one clinic might not be seen by another. These gaps in clinical data lead to gaps in patient care.

When a patient gets radiologic imaging, they may have findings unrelated to the reason they initially got the imaging. For example, a chest CT for a car accident might reveal an incidental lung nodule that could be cancerous. Unfortunately, research shows that a large portion of patients do not get follow up for these incidental findings because it isn’t the primary reason why the patient is seeing a doctor. Moreover, social determinants of health are a factor that affects which patients receive follow-up care. Identifying these patients and providing the necessary follow up care prevents adverse events related to delayed detection of cancer.

With Cloud Healthcare solutions, Northwell built an AI model to identify these patients so that oncologists can appropriately follow up with patients who have findings suspicious for lung cancer. The AI model detects incidental pulmonary nodules in radiology reports so that doctors can then contact the patients that need follow-up care. Nic says his team was able to build this system in a week: “Google Cloud did a lot of heavy-lifting for us and allowed us to get to the AI applications much faster. It allowed us to build a platform that just works.” 

Healthcare systems can now rapidly generate healthcare insights with one end-to-end solution, Google Cloud Healthcare Data Engine. It builds on and extends the core capabilities of the Google Cloud Healthcare API to make healthcare data more immediately useful by enabling an interoperable, longitudinal record of patient data. Northwell Health uses Google Cloud as the core of their platform, enabling their developers to create solutions to the most pressing healthcare problems.

Special thanks to Kalyan Pamarthy, Product Management Lead on Cloud Healthcare and Natural Language APIs for contributing to this blog post.