The following image shows the Google logo on a laptop screen and the Microsoft logo on a mobile phone screen. [+] This illustrated photo was taken in Krakow, Poland on February 8, 2023. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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Microsoft and Google have announced new capabilities for their healthcare cloud products aimed at unifying data from various sources, including EHRs, labs and revenue cycle, to help organizations gain insights from disparate data sets and establish standardized processes.
Health systems maintain hundreds of applications within their portfolios, placing a significant burden on staff, especially clinical teams attempting to extract insights from clinical data across structured and unstructured data repositories.
Google Cloud has introduced new capabilities in Vertex AI Search for healthcare and life sciences organizations, enabling them to search a wide range of data, including clinical sources such as FHIR data and clinical notes, using generative AI tailored for healthcare.
Microsoft has introduced an industry-specific healthcare solution into Fabric that enables organizations to integrate data from standalone applications. Currently in preview mode, Fabric’s healthcare data solution streamlines the process by eliminating the costly and time-consuming task of integrating disjointed medical data sources, such as text, images, and video.
The first step for healthcare CIOs and organizations is to migrate all on-premise applications or application data from other cloud providers to a specific cloud provider, which allows the platform (Vertex AI or Fabric) to extract insights from all the different data sources.
“Hunterdon Health moved to the Google Workspace platform almost nine years ago. The impetus was to find a modern collaboration platform in a cost-effective way. This pragmatic journey continues today as we move our infrastructure to GCP. This foundational step will soon transition into the cornerstone of our data strategy,” said Edmund Siy, chief digital and information officer at Hunterdon Health.
If your healthcare organization uses the MEDITECH Expanse EHR, we already have a partnership to adopt Google’s Medical Large-Scale Language Model, or Med-PaLM 2. This partnership will help clinicians gain deeper insights into their patients’ medical histories.
By combining Vertex AI with Med-PaLM 2, Google aims to take healthcare to a new level. For example, clinicians can ask questions about a patient’s condition and past medical history without having to read through a note field. Doctors can ask specific questions, such as the last time a critical lab value was out of range in the past 12 months. This new capability is expected to save clinicians a lot of time and reduce clinical fatigue that is prevalent in the industry.
“We’ve already embedded Google Health search and summary capabilities into our Expanse EHR and are delivering that solution to our customers, which is an accomplishment we’re all very proud of. Next we’ll look at how the broader capabilities of Vertex AI Search can further empower caregivers and patients,” said Helen Waters, EVP and COO at MEDITECH. “These capabilities go beyond simply consolidating information to organize and surface the most important information, aiding the workflow of overburdened care teams.”
The bottom line is that medical data is spread across many formats and locations – PDFs, faxes, electronic medical records, diagnostic reports – making search and data standardization a challenge. Given their presence in the industry, Google and Microsoft are well positioned to tackle this challenge with foundational search engine technology for healthcare.
