GOOGLE HAS ITS OWN EHR PLAN: The U.S. Patent Office last Thursday published a 40-page application that Google submitted in July 2017 for what’s essentially a new type of EHR consisting of three pieces. It would include a computer memory storing aggregated EHR data from millions of patients; a computer executing deep learning on those records in a standardized data structure format, and an interface for clinicians displaying salient facts from the patient’s past and predicted future clinical events.
The application, whose inventors include 21 Google employees including Google.ai leader Jeffrey Dean, notes the “need for systems and methods to assist health care providers to allocate their attention efficiently among the overabundance of information from diverse sources, as well as to provide predictions of future clinical events and highlighting of relevant underlying medical events contributing to these predictions.” The invention “addresses a pressing question facing the physician in the hospital, namely, which patients have the highest need for my attention now, and … what information in the patient’s chart should I attend to.”
It includes a hypothetical case of an alcoholic’s withdrawal symptoms being mistaken for septic shock (the computer, natch, would have made the right call).
A Google spokesperson had no comment but pointed to the article Google scientists published with colleagues from Stanford, UCSF and the University of Chicago last May, in which they used FHIR resources to create a data format that enabled them to crank through thousands of records and come up with accurate retrospective outcome predictions.
Article link: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-ehealth/2019/02/04/data-mongers-have-your-number-for-opioid-abuse-501593
