Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian speaks on the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco, April 9, 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Highmark Health announced Monday that it’s integrating technology from Google Cloud and the health-care software company Epic Systems to try to enhance data gathering for providers and payers.
Consumer health-care data is stored across different systems and formats within the U.S., and the fragmentation could make it difficult for payers and providers to access the precise information they need. It is a growing opportunity for cloud providers like Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.
Highmark, headquartered in Pittsburgh, is the parent company of a health plan with 7 million members, a provider network of 14 hospitals and a number of other other entities.
Combining Epic’s Payer Platform, which sends patient data between payers and providers, with Google’s analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities will allow quicker access to useful data a few patient, comparable to their upcoming visits, medical history, insurance claims and health plan advantages, Highmark said.
This sort of information is usually stored across multiple databases and formats, which suggests it might be difficult and tedious for doctors and insurance employees to trace down, experts said.
A 2022 report from the American Medical Association said fragmentation is a “perpetual failing of our current health care system,” and the organization called for the creation of latest technologies and policies to assist reduce it. The “substantial cognitive load” of organizing large volumes of knowledge across complex software is causing physician burnout, in keeping with an April 2023 study published within the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health.
Highmark said its recent integration will automate administrative processes comparable to prior authorization, an insurance cost-control process that the AMA says is “manual and time consuming.”
Dr. Tony Farah, chief medical and clinical transformation officer at Highmark Health, said the combination may even help doctors make more informed decisions about proper next steps, and eventually reduce the fee of look after patients.
“Doctors don’t need assistance once they’ve information; the issue is that they do not have it,” Farah told CNBC in an interview. “The concept is to supply such a actionable information well ahead of time, any time of the day.”
Richard Clarke, chief analytics officer at Highmark Health, told CNBC that easier access to data a few patient will help clinicians ensure patients are receiving the care that is best for them and avoid unnecessary steps comparable to extra visits or readmissions.
Highmark said its recent integration may even help it aggregate clinical data from its hospitals that representatives from its health plan have to access. The technology can routinely notify the health plan about upcoming patient visits, as an illustration.
“It really eliminates the necessity to do this manually, where the health plan could have formally sent some requests to the provider or called them and created a bunch of manual steps,” Clarke said. “This may be done seamlessly now.”
Highmark said its provider system estimates that the shared claims data from the combination with Google Cloud will help it save around $2.7 million every year.
Amy Waldron, global director of healthcare strategy and solutions at Google Cloud, told CNBC that with Highmark’s integration “the buyer finally goes to be getting value from their health-care data.”
It’s too early to know whether Highmark’s integration will make a cloth difference for its providers, its health plan or the general quality of its patient care.
Highmark said it plans to roll out the technology to its provider network by the tip of the second quarter and to no less than two additional Epic-based providers inside its insurance network by the tip of 2024.
