The Cloud Will See You Now: Everything You Need to Know About the Healthcare Roadmap with Google

Healthcare has always been one of the most complicated verticals for any technology vendor. There's so much to think about, from privacy regulations like HIPAA to patient care and innovation. Of course, despite the complexity of the healthcare space, it's also a market that's packed full of potential, which makes it difficult big movers like Google to ignore.

As a brand that always appears to be on the cutting edge - even in the most complex of industries, Google has jumped into action in recent years to help with the analysis and aggregation of medical data, as well as the implementation of AI and new technology into the healthcare space. Rather than simply trying to create a consumer product, Google has been looking for ways to solve problems with their healthcare clients. For instance, the Google Cloud platform offers HIPAA compliance support from end to end.

Additionally, with Google Big Data tools, users can easily transform large amounts of data from an insurance, clinical, and genomic perspective into breakthroughs in medical performance. The BigQuery data warehouse allows healthcare groups to find meaningful insights without having to invest in additional on-site infrastructure, while Google's Genomics tools are based on years of innovation, and capable of processing petabytes of data.

The Evolution of Google Health Care at Google Next

As Google continues to explore more opportunities for healthcare transformation, where better to discuss the next step in their roadmap, than at Google Next? This year's event in July was a fantastic platform for the company to discuss collaborations with various IT vendors, and a stronger vision of what healthcare support from Google might look like in the future. For instance, Lahey Health took to the stage in a customer keynote as part of the Google Cloud Customer Innovation Series this year, explaining how their journey to the cloud with Google was simplified, despite the need to move four legacy email systems into G-Suite.

Perhaps more exciting, however, was the discussion of Google's healthcare-specific API, designed to help organizations address interoperability challenges in the healthcare industry. The Cloud healthcare API alpha supports standards-driven protocols and data formats for existing healthcare technologies. The idea is that this new solution will help to connect Google users to the cloud if they're still behind in their digital transformation processes. Additionally, the API aims to simplify application development for healthcare groups too.

The Cloud Healthcare API bridges the gap between applications and healthcare systems developed within the GCP. The supportive standards of the API ensure that no matter which protocols you have in place, you'll be able to develop your strategy with everything from scalable analytics through BigQuery, and data processing with Cloud Dataproc. There's even the opportunity to tap into the power of machine learning with Cloud ML Engine.

The healthcare API should accelerate the digital transformation process for organizations that use existing clinical systems while allowing new entrants to integrate with care networks easily.

The New Partnership with NIH

Another significant announcement to emerge at Google Cloud Next this year was the inspiring partnership with NIH - the National Institutes of Health. This new collaboration is intended to help Google make research datasets easier to access for health companies, as well as giving them new opportunities to integrate research authentication and authorization services with Google Cloud solutions. Google will also be working on making sure that they can support industry standards for data discovery, access, and cloud computing too.

Google will be working alongside the National Institutes of Health on their new initiative, named the "STRIDES" - Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability. Google Cloud is the first industry partner in the program, and the group leading the way towards better biomedical computing and healthcare advances. The collaboration with Google will create a compelling and cost-efficient framework for NIH researchers to access new data in institutions around the nation. What's more, the partnership will also lead to better work for NIH's Data Commons pilot. This refers to the group of project innovations that test new resources and deliver new methods for data sharing in the cloud.

Google Continues to Pave the Way for Healthcare Innovation

Google has continued to build on its healthcare portfolio after Cloud Next came to an end too! Iron Mountain and ClearDATA both made announcements this week which highlight new partnerships with the Google Cloud, and lead the way for further innovation in the healthcare industry. The Iron Mountain partnership with Google is based around the development of a new AI-powered SaaS solution (Software as a service). The collaboration hopes to give organizations access to a more complete set of data repositories so that all of the data collected by healthcare groups can be made into an actionable hub.

In the same week, ClearDATA also announced a partnership with Google Cloud to help ensure healthcare compliance in digital tools. The focus of this strategy remains heavily on analytics and using large data sets to transform the healthcare vertical. ClearDATA wants to provide companies with the chance to access analytical tools on Google Cloud without having to worry about issues with compliance. Eventually, the collaboration will also help healthcare developers to access the Kubernetes Engine to automate application deployment.

Curing the Cloud with Google

Google Cloud has been backing the healthcare industry for years now, offering flexible and inexpensive solutions for data storage and innovation. Now, it seems that they're moving even further into the space, following their announcements at Google Next and beyond. From imaging analytics that rival human results, to next level AI, Google has transformed the way that companies approach healthcare. Google is even looking at new ways to take their expertise deeper into the average clinic setting with voice recognition tools that enhance and improve EHR workflows.

If we've learned anything from Google Cloud Next this year, it's that the cloud and Google technology isn't reserved just for the mid-market enterprise - it's a solution for the future of healthcare too.