Google Partnership to Pilot New Offering in Outpatient Care Setting

Google Health has announced a partnership with California-based Desert Oasis Healthcare (DOHC), part of the Heritage Provider Network, to pilot Care Studio.

Care Studio is an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven, clinician-facing EHR search tool designed to harmonize healthcare data from various sources and pull that data into an interface to help clinicians find information more easily, according to the Care Studio product page. Once data is organized, the tool automatically shows the most important information first, such as hospital visits, outpatient events, laboratory tests, medications, and treatment and progress notes.

The tool aims to streamline clinicians’ workflows and give them more time for patient care. DOHC is the first outpatient clinic to pilot the tool. The medical group, which serves about 60,000 patients, plans to pilot Care Studio with a small number of DOHC clinicians and gradually increase the user base over time. The press release states that DOHC will use the tool to support its preventive care and chronic disease management efforts by addressing data fragmentation and silo issues.

DOHC is the third provider partnership Google Health has undertaken to pilot Care Studio. Ascension was Google’s first collaborator in these efforts in February 2021. Shortly after Google and Ascension launched their partnership, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center also signed on to pilot the tool. In addition, Google Health has partnered with EHR vendor MEDITECH to create a Care Studio-integrated solution within MEDITECH’s EHR platform.

Following these partnerships, Google Health announced Care Studio’s newest feature, known as Conditions, at the ViVE Conference in March. Conditions leverages natural language processing (NLP) to provide clinicians with additional insights into a patient’s medical history by synthesizing information from unstructured clinical notes.

This is Google’s latest effort to bolster healthcare through the use of AI and data analytics.

Last week, Google and New Jersey-based Hackensack Meridian Health launched a partnership to leverage Google Cloud’s new Medical Imaging Suite to predict metastasis in patients with prostate cancer.

Last month, Google Cloud teamed up with LifePoint Health to use the tech company’s Healthcare Data Engine (HDE) to enhance data interoperability, patient monitoring, and virtual care within the health system.

In July, the tech giant collaborated with New York-based Northwell Health to use cloud technology and AI to accelerate the health system’s digital transformation to improve patient care, clinician experience, and operational efficiency.

And last year, Google Cloud and HCA Healthcare partnered to enhance data analytics and clinical decision support technologies within the health system in an effort to develop innovative operational models, gain access to actionable insights, and create more efficient workflows.