Medical group Desert Oasis Healthcare has jumped on board to pilot Google Health’s clinical software Care Studio. This marks Google Health’s third provider partnership and first outpatient collaboration for its clinician-facing search tool that harmonizes healthcare data from different sources. The Google Health team is excited to share this partnership.
Desert Oasis Healthcare (DOHC) provides medical care and wellness services to patients in the Coachella Valley and surrounding desert communities of Riverside and San Bernardino counties in California.
DOHC serves over 60,000 members/patients by contracting or working with:
- Primary care providers
- Accountable Care (ACOs)
- Diagnostic centers
- Health care systems
- Palliative care providers
- Home health care
- Family hospice providers
- Over 200 specialists
- Community resources
- Community support
DOHC’s network comprises members of an Independent Physician Association (IPA) and medical group. These are legal entities organized and directed by physicians in private or group practices.
Care Studio was born out of Google’s partnership with Ascension to pilot an electronic health record search tool that pulls patient electronic health records into an interface to help clinicians more easily find helpful information. In February 2021, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center also signed on to pilot the clinical search tool Care Studio. This is Google’s latest effort to bolster healthcare using AI and data analytics.
About a week ago, Google and New Jersey-based Hackensack Meridian Health launched a partnership to leverage Google Cloud’s new Medical Imaging Suite to predict metastasis in patients with prostate cancer. Then last month, Google Cloud teamed up with LifePoint Health to use the tech company’s Healthcare Data Engine (HDE) to enhance data interoperability, patient monitoring, and virtual care within the health system. In July, the tech giant collaborated with New York-based Northwell Health to use cloud technology and AI to accelerate the health system’s digital transformation to improve patient care, clinician experience, and operational efficiency. Last year, Google Cloud and HCA Healthcare partnered to enhance data analytics and clinical decision support technologies within the health system to develop innovative operational models, gain access to actionable insights, and create more efficient workflows.
With Care Studio, Google Health is bringing to bear its medically tuned search capabilities, including the ability to search through scanned documents, faxes, and PDFs. The software’s conditions feature provides a concise summary of a patient’s medical conditions, along with context and related information, including labs, medications, and reports to help clinicians manage and treat illnesses, according to Google Health. The aim is to expand the technology to more users over time gradually. Google has piloted the EHR Care Studio tool at St. Louis-based Ascension Health and Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
“Desert Oasis Healthcare has a history of working with innovative technology partners,” Hodgkin said, “and the organization feels confident about Google’s data privacy and security approach. Protected health information, in our eyes, is sacred. Everything that we do is predicated on making sure we’re protecting patients’ health information. We’ve never worked with a company that’s been so dedicated to the same mission. We feel very comfortable that the PHI that we’re sharing through our business associate agreement and in the cloud-based algorithms that we’ll be using that our patients’ PHI is safe and protected.”
