Google and national hospital chain HCA Healthcare Inc. have joined forces to develop healthcare algorithms using patient records, the latest sign of Big Tech gaining a significant foothold in healthcare.
Nashville, Tenn.,-based HCA, which operates across about 2,000 locations in 21 states, will use Google to store data from digital health records and internet-connected medical devices under the multiyear agreement.
According to the companies, Google and HCA engineers will develop algorithms to help improve operating efficiency, monitor patients and guide doctors’ decisions.
“Data are spun off of every patient in real-time,” said Dr. Jonathan Perlin, HCA’s chief medical officer. “Part of what we’re building is a central nervous system to help interpret the various signals.”
Dr. Perlin said HCA patient records would be stripped of identifying information before being shared with Google.
Google will access data when needed with consent from HCA. Still, the tech giant can develop analytic tools without patient records and allow HCA to test the models independently, said Chris Sakalosky, managing director of healthcare and life sciences at Google Cloud. “We want to push the boundaries of what the clinician can do in real-time with data, ” he said.
This latest announcement comes following the implementation of federal information blocking rules on April 5th designed to provide which patients read access to their medical records.
Google also released a new tool this morning that helps with tracking health information to advance health equity.
The company released The Health Equity Tracker (HET), a publicly available data platform that visually displays and contextualizes the health disparities facing communities of color throughout the U.S.
