Global, Interview

MEDITECH and Google Health pilot search and summarisation integration

MEDITECH and Google Health have extended a pilot that embeds Google search and summarisation capabilities directly within the clinical workflow of the Expanse electronic health record.

The partnership is working with with two health systems in Alabama and Wisconsin, who are early adopters of the solution, to help create a longitudinal view of a patient’s health history within the web-based Expanse platform.

The company notes the tool provides “intuitive access to relevant clinical information on patients from both legacy platforms and disparate systems” and ultimately “will enable a more holistic view of the patient and their conditions”.

It is said to support intelligent summarisation and search and to extract information from different parts of the patient record, including canned documents, to produce a curated summary of a patient’s health conditions.

Billy Helmandollar, CIO at DCH Health System and one of the early adopter sites, commented: “This feature takes our EHR to new heights in our ability to provide holistic, patient-centred care. It is positioning our doctors, nurses, and care providers to aggregate information on patients’ past and present conditions faster, to improve the quality of care.

“We must innovate and think outside the box in order to have advancements in healthcare technology and reduce the burden on clinicians.”

Dr. Robin Wilson, CMO of DCH Health System, added: “Having a consolidated, condition-level view of both structured and unstructured data from across the patient’s history — regardless of how or where it is stored — means less time searching records and more time treating our patients.”

MEDITECH COO and Executive Vice President Helen Waters, added: “Imagine the profound impact we can have on clinician satisfaction when a physician can easily find relevant information from within a patient’s health history and feel positively influenced by the technology vs. frustrated by its presence. Our collaboration with Google Health is going to make this vision a reality by addressing the burnout openly discussed in our collective EHR market space, regardless of which EHR vendor is deployed.”