Strengthening health equity
To help everyone achieve their highest levels of health, organizations 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 enable healthcare organizations to connect patients to community resources; support work with analytics; and dashboards to help organizations leverage social determinants of health (SDOH) datasets, and more. Traditional forecasting tools lack social determinants of health, and this accelerator will include SDOH, along with Health Level Seven (HL7) and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) 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."
Reinventing operations and experiences
Patients are increasingly frustrated with navigating appointments and wait times, and inefficiencies can cost organizations 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 visualizations 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.

Improving quality of care
Value-based care is an emerging alternative to fee-for-service reimbursements, that ties payments to the quality of care provided. In order to deliver value-based care, organizations need to have access to the right data to assess quality and outcomes, and data interoperability is critical to make that data useful for analytics and insights. The HDE accelerator targeting value-based care will help organizations analyze 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 C. Garrett, FACHE, and 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."

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