Google Expands Its Information Sorting Tool Pilot           

Google is expanding its pilot of Care Studio, a new tool designed to help clinicians get to the information they need more easily. The tool, which comes from the Google Health team, takes advantage of its experience in organizing complex health information.

According to a recent Google blog entry, Care Studio is a software solution providing a comprehensive view of a patient’s records. Care Studio lets clinicians search quickly through complicated patient information and view the results in context.

Google began the Care Studio pilot with a small group of clinicians in Nashville, TN and Jacksonville, FL affiliated with Ascension. It now plans to expand the pilot to additional physicians and nurses.

Like Amazon, which doesn’t hype its incremental progress in healthcare very much, Google hasn’t made a tremendous amount of noise about Care Studio. However, I expect it to get a lot more attention once it goes beyond the pilot stage.

For what it’s worth, the tool appears to do some downright neat things. For example, it brings together information from patient records housed in multiple EHRs used by an organization, including both inpatient and outpatient records.

This could prove to be a breakthrough for clinicians managing patients whose conditions call for multiple specialties, such as physical therapy and psych services.  (As someone with multiple chronic conditions, I can attest that it would be helpful to me as well if Google opens a version of Care Studio to patients.)

It also makes it easier for doctors to get information in fewer clicks, letting clinicians, say, organize patients’ medication history by dosing and when the meds were prescribed.

The Google tool also syncs up medical data across different systems to make the it consistent. For example, though data such as blood pressure or glucose levels are reported using different units of measurement, Care Studio automatically converts these numbers into a format that makes comparisons easier.

The blog item also emphasizes that Google is doing its part to keep the patient data secure.  For one thing, this data is encrypted and stored separately from customer and consumer data. The tech giant also participates in ongoing audits along with maintaining external certifications such as ISO 27001 and SOC2/3.

What we need to see now is how this tool fits into physician workflow. As interesting as these functions may be it’s not clear how they can be integrated into daily medical practice.

Let’s see how clinicians participating in the pilot actually use the data Care Studio produces. If the tool minimizes the effort they need to invest in delivering patient care, it should be a major success. If it simply adds another layer of complexity to the process, not so much.

 

 

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

Categories