At last week’s HLTH conference in Las Vegas, Google Cloud announced three accelerators to help healthcare companies improve health equity, patient flow and value-based care.

The Healthcare Data Engine (HDE) accelerators were developed in collaboration with Hackensack Meridian Health, Lifepoint Health and others, and could help organisations run more effectively and improve patient care.

Frequently, the information healthcare specialists and administrators need is siloed and isn’t easy to access. It may be buried deep in the patient record or spread across IT systems that don’t speak to each other. Improving the flow and unification of data across health care systems, referred to as interoperability, is critical to helping organisations run more effectively, improving patient care and enabling people to live healthier lives.

Available early next year, the HDE accelerators offer tailored infrastructure deployment configurations, big-query data models, and looker dashboard templates to support adoption and time-to-value of HDE for these common industry problems. HDE leverages Google Cloud’s infrastructure and secure data storage that support HIPAA compliance and, when implemented, each user’s layers of security, privacy controls and processes protect the access and use of patient data.

“These accelerators, developed collaboratively with healthcare organisations, will solve a range of industry pain points, and they will unlock the truly transformative power of interoperable longitudinal patient records,” said Aashima Gupta, global director of Google Cloud’s healthcare strategy. “The kind of transformation needed in healthcare can be daunting and slow, but an incremental, use-case-based approach breaks apart these challenges into manageable solutions that capture specific business opportunities and drive innovation.”

Jessica Beegle, senior vice president at Lifepoint Health, added: “Google Cloud’s 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. 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 USA.”

To help everyone achieve their highest levels of health, organisations must overcome economic, social and other obstacles to healthcare, and eliminate preventable health disparities. One of the new HDE accelerators will support health equity, providing tools to help healthcare organisations connect patients to community resources and support work with analytics. The dashboards help organisations leverage social determinants of health (SDoH) datasets, and more. Traditional forecasting tools lack SDoH, and this accelerator will include SDoH, along with Health Level Seven (HL7) and fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIRs) data for longitudinal patient records.

“We applaud Google for its innovation around privacy and security, and its ongoing commitment to the healthcare API and innovation,” said Cris Ross, chief information officer at Mayo Clinic. “These healthcare accelerators will be important tools for our scientists and innovators to reduce health disparities and inequity.”

Patients are increasingly frustrated with navigating appointments and wait times, and inefficiencies can cost organisations time and money to manage. Staffing shortages and employee burnout remain a major challenge in healthcare. Driving efficiencies in this area can help healthcare workers improve patient experiences and care. The HDE accelerator focused on patient flow provides aggregate data and visualisations to help health systems understand a broad range of patient flow metrics to surface trends, potential drivers and bottlenecks to help inform clinical operations performance initiatives.

Value-based care is an emerging alternative to fee-for-service reimbursements, that ties payments to the quality of care provided. To deliver value-based care, organisations need access to the right data to assess quality and outcomes, and data interoperability is critical to make those data useful for analytics and insights. The HDE accelerator targeting value-based careshould help organisations analyse trends and identify key population health metrics from combining claims and clinical data.

“Promoting health equity and human dignity to improve the health of our communities is a fundamental priority for our network,” said Robert Garrett, chief executive officer for Hackensack Meridian Health. “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.”

Richard Clarke, chief data and analytics officer at Highmark Health, added: “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. HDE 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.”