Just a week after pulling back the curtain on new natural language processing features for Care Studio, its clinician-facing patient record interface, at the ViVE conference in Miami, Google Health took to HIMSS 2022 to announce the technology’s first-ever integration with an electronic health record vendor.
News site Fierce Healthcare cited a “to-be-published blog post” from Google saying “Using Google Health’s tools, Meditech will form a longitudinal health data layer, bringing together data from different sources into a standard format and offering clinicians a full view of patient records.“
Google wrote that it has entered into a collaboration with Meditech to develop “a deeply integrated solution” that marries the search, contextualization and data harmonization capabilities of Google Health’s Care Studio with Meditech Expanse, the vendor’s web-based EHR platform.
“Using Google Health’s tools, Meditech will form a longitudinal health data layer, bringing together data from different sources into a standard format and offering clinicians a full view of patient records,” Google Health wrote in the to-be-published blog post. “And with Google Health’s search functionality embedded into their EHR, clinicians can find salient information faster for a more frictionless experience and the intelligent summarization can highlight critical information directly in the Expanse workflow.”
Care Studio leans on Google’s expertise in organizing information to help clinicians find health record information faster. The tool’s Clinical Search feature enables clinicians to simply type what they’re looking for and quickly find the specific information requested, and even related concepts.
Today’s medical data is often siloed, health records live within and across multiple systems. Care Studio simplifies complex information by creating a real-time, normalized longitudinal representation of a person’s clinical data.
The Google tools give clinicians a single, centralized view that automatically brings forward a patient’s important information – including hospital visits, outpatient events, laboratory tests, medications, and treatment and progress notes. And the intuitive interface offers unique ways to visualize health data and trends in tables, graphs and other helpful formats.
The Care Studio mobile app makes it easy to find important information before seeing a new patient, or quickly check in on a patient’s progress. It helps clinicians easily search a patient’s record, review the most recent physician notes, view a patient’s lab trends and more right from their phone.
In an Axios interview in January, Google Chief Health Officer Karen DeSalvo said, “When we think about how we’re going to support the health ecosystem, we’ve got three big buckets. Is it going to support consumers in their health journey? Is it going to support caregivers who are providing the services on the front lines – or is it going to support community context? Those are our three C’s: consumer, caregiver and community context.”
Google also used last week’s ViVE healthcare conference in Miami Beach to preview its new Conditions capability.
A March 8 Google blog, said “Healthcare data is structured in numerous ways, making it difficult to organize. Clinical notes may be written differently and stored across different systems. Clinician notes also differ based on if content is meant for clinical decision making, billing or regulatory uses.”
“Further, when it comes to writing notes, clinicians use different abbreviations or acronyms depending on their personal preference, what health system they’re a part of, their region and other factors. All of this has made it difficult to synthesize clinical data – until now.”
Adding Conditions to Google Health enables algorithms to pull meaningful detail from physician and clinician notes often written in partial sentences or using non-standardized terms to describe diagnostic findings, even ferreting out misspellings that can cause problems.