Google inks deal with Meditech as first EHR vendor to integrate Care Studio

USA – Electronic health record vendor Meditech and Google Health have announced at HIMSS22 that they are partnering to pilot a solution that will enable the use of Google Health’s search and summarization capabilities within Meditech’s Expanse EHR.

Specifically, the solution will embed Google Health’s Care Studio product suite within the Expanse EHR, helping clinicians gain “quick and easy access to information from multiple sources with a true longitudinal view of a patient’s health history,” according to MEDITECH.

According to Paul Muret, general manager of Google Health’s Care Studio, the collaboration will “assist health systems overcome challenges associated with data silos.”

Meanwhile, MEDITECH chief operating officer Helen Waters stated that by collaborating, “we’re advancing interoperable healthcare data exchange, building a future EHR platform, and continuing our mission to propel data liquidity and support the future of digital health ecosystems.“

Care Studio, according to Google Health, is designed to make it easier to sift through patient records, and the company is continuing to improve the product’s search capabilities for medical data, notes, and scanned documents, as well as using AI to help make sense of clinical data.

The company recently launched a new feature that summarizes a patient’s condition and uses natural language processing to link to related information, such as drugs or lab results, providing clinicians with more context to assess the medical problem.

Longitudinal health data layer

Meditech will use Google Health’s tools to build a longitudinal health data layer, which will bring together data from various sources and harmonize it into a standard FHIR format designed specifically for clinician tools.

According to the companies, this would pull discrete data from legacy and disparate systems and provide a longitudinal view of a patient’s health history.

According to Google Health, intelligent summarization extracts information from various parts of the patient record to produce a summary of a patient’s health conditions.

Clinicians can then drill down into critical information related to treating and monitoring the conditions, such as lab results, vitals, and medications.

The expanded Meditech partnership means that Google’s Care Studio will eventually be in the hands of physicians at a variety of new health systems: Meditech has over 623 hospital clients, according to its website.

If Care Studio’s partnership is well received by Meditech’s hospital clients, it could pave the way for Google to collaborate with larger EHR vendors such as Epic and Oracle’s Cerner.

This would allow Google’s Care Studio to scale more quickly than a Meditech partnership alone could.

According to 2021 KLAS data, Epic dominates the EHR market with a 31% market share, while Cerner comes in second with a 25% market share.

Meanwhile, Meditech lags behind both of these players, accounting for only 16% of the EHR market.

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