Recently, we shared news about the growing feature set under development as part of Google Health’s Care Studio, most recently its “Conditions” feature which summarizes patient conditions and uses NLP to link related information like labs or medications to those condition listings.
This week we learned that MEDITECH plans to embrace Care Studio, specifically by integrating its data harmonization, search and summarization capabilities into its Web-based MEDITECH Expanse EHR. The summarization tool will highlight critical information directly in the Expanse workflow including data from different sources into the MEDITECH EHR..
Google is using HL7 FHIR to support the data harmonization process, but in a blog entry on the subject, Google Health VP and general manager of Care Studio Paul Muret says that this is just an initial approach. “There is more to be done before FHIR is widely adopted and systems can effectively exchange information,” Muret wrote.
MEDITECH plans to use Google Health tools to form a longitudinal health data layer bringing data from different sources into a single standard format. This integration will include embedding Google Health’s search functionality into Expanse. The upgraded EHR will use Google Cloud’s infrastructure which had been an important partnership between Google Cloud and MEDITECH for years.
This strikes me as the kind of deal we should have seen years ago. With first-gen EHRs built around billing concerns, they’ve always been a step or two behind what clinicians needed. This is particularly true when it came to pulling in data across multiple sources. To this day, most are far from intuitive, and they tend to be hard to “train” to accommodate the care paths that work for the people who use them.
Of course, over the years EHR developers have worked to fix this problem within their products. It’s fair to say that they are far more aware of and concerned with workflow and usability than they did back in the bad old days when they first rolled out and got adopted by hospitals focused primarily on HITECH bucks.
Over time, many vendors have attempted to tackle some of the usability problems their systems still had. They have largely done so by working with customers to see what should be changed then upgrading and rewriting their code.
In more recent times, it’s become more common for EHR vendors to add functionality from outside partners specializing in key functions such as patient engagement or billing. But we still haven’t seen many situations in which the big EHR vendors have brought new software on board that addresses the core clinical workflow problems that continue to create problems for EHR users.
Maybe I’m overly impressed by this deal, but I think the partnership between Google Health and MEDITECH could be something of a landmark in the evolution of EHR usability.
We’re not talking about a situation in which MEDITECH is just bolting on a small added function to Expanse, we’re looking at a deal that could enhance the product substantially. When the Care Studio integration is rolled out, Expanse users are going to have a meaningfully different experience of how they access data and how they use it to make decisions about patient care.
I am going to be watching this partnership carefully to see whether the integration happens and performs as promised. I am very interested in whether the two parties successfully marry their respective technologies and whether this marriage delivers the promised benefits.
