Google, Health Systems Develop ‘Accelerators’ to Improve Patient Care

At HLTH 2022, Google Cloud announced three new Healthcare Data Engine (HDE) accelerators, created in collaboration with Hackensack Meridian Health, Lifepoint Health, and other organizations, to help improve health equity, patient flow, and value-based care.

According to the press release, the HDE accelerators are designed to improve interoperability and data unification across health systems. The accelerators “offer tailored infrastructure deployment configurations, BigQuery data models, and Looker dashboard templates to support adoption and time-to-value of HDE for these common industry challenges.”

By addressing these pain points, the accelerators have the potential to help support health systems’ digital transformation.

"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, in the press release. "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."

Each accelerator will focus on a different aspect of improving patient care and health system efficiency.

The first aims to support health equity by providing health systems with tools to connect patients with community resources, leverage social determinants of health (SDOH) datasets, and improve analytics.

"Promoting health equity and human dignity to improve the health of our communities is a fundamental priority for our network," said Robert C. Garrett, CEO of Hackensack Meridian Health, in the press release. "This latest development from our partnership with Google Cloud will enable us to delve deeper into value-based care and accelerate the strides our research teams are making in these areas."

The second will help health systems enhance operations and patient experience by focusing on patient flow. This accelerator is designed to provide aggregate data and visualizations to illustrate a broad range of patient flow metrics, trends, and bottlenecks within a health system that can be used to inform clinical operations-focused performance initiatives.

The final accelerator is concerned with improving the quality of care by advancing value-based care and interoperability. Through this accelerator, health systems can analyze key population health metrics and combine claims and clinical data to generate insights into care quality and outcomes.

"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 at Highmark Health, in the press release. "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."

The three HDE accelerators will become available in early 2023.