Driving operational insights with Healthcare Data Engine Accelerators

Healthcare leaders are increasingly challenged to drive operational improvements throughout their facilities, and inefficiencies can cost organizations both time and money and impact patient outcomes. Additionally, staffing shortages and employee burnout remain a major concern in healthcare. Addressing these challenges can help healthcare providers improve organizational operations, patient experiences and care. However, the information that they need to solve these problems is siloed and challenging to access, buried deep in the patient record or spread across IT systems that don’t speak to one another. 

To generate a longitudinal patient view and improve patient care, healthcare providers need to reduce fragmentation, unify, and standardize data across siloed systems of records, care facilities and ultimately make it interoperable. This is the heart of Google Cloud’s Healthcare Data Engine. 

In partnership with customers, we are prioritizing a ‘use case’ approach to accelerate the adoption of data interoperability. We initially introduced these accelerators a few months ago, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Since then, we have been incorporating feedback from early adopters and making improvements to ensure that these accelerators deliver the best possible value to our customers.  

The accelerators are deployable use-case configured ‘starter-kits’ within Healthcare Data Engine designed to quickly surface tailored insights with the goal of enabling higher quality of care. Focused on patient flow, transition of care, and social determinants of health, the accelerators provide aggregated data and visualizations to help customers understand a broad range of facility efficiency metrics, patient insight and health equity measures across their patient populations: 

1. Patient Flow Explorer: Enables health systems to surface a range of facility efficiency metrics to identify trends and potential drivers of bottlenecks, manage patient admissions, transfers and length of stay, while optimizing departmental capacity management.

2. Transition of Care Explorer:  Provides medical professionals a consolidated view into a patient's detail and medical history, illustrating their journeys in different settings within the health system and helps caregivers prioritize patient treatment.

3. Social Determinants of Health Explorer:  Leverages Healthcare Data Engine and social determinants of health data to identify at risk populations of patients in near-real-time and improve care in under-served communities.

The first three accelerator use cases were designed in collaboration with industry healthcare leaders including Highmark Health, Lifepoint Health, and others, helping organizations address common industry challenges.

“Interoperability is at the heart of Highmark Health’s Living Health strategy and we intend to leverage our blended structure of payor and provider to deliver a differentiated health experience for our patients and members,” said Richard Clarke, chief data and analytics officer, Highmark Health. “Healthcare Data Engine is a central component to enabling that strategy and we are excited about the new accelerators being announced today as they will speed up time-to-value for our members.”

"Google Cloud's solution-oriented approach brings the best of technology and healthcare together to help improve quality, increase access and ensure equitable care for patients no matter where they live," said Jessica Beegle, senior vice president and chief innovation officer of Lifepoint Health. "Instead of giving us building blocks that need to be assembled, they are delivering custom-built solutions to help us efficiently tackle key problems in our markets and provide more useful data for our clinical teams to take better care of their patients. Lifepoint is proud to partner with Google Cloud and bring the best of Silicon Valley to communities of all sizes across the United States."

At Google Cloud, we will continue our partnership with healthcare leaders to identify the most impactful Healthcare Data Engine use cases to support, to help organizations accelerate their data transformations to bring better, more timely care to patients and communities. To learn more about Healthcare Data Engine and other solutions tailored to the healthcare and life sciences space, visit cloud.google.com/healthcare.