Google has announced the launch in general availability of Cloud Healthcare API, a service that facilitates the exchange of data between health care applications and solutions built on Google Cloud. The API allows organizations to ingest and manage data from a range of inputs and systems, and then to analyze that data through the use of privacy-preserving AI and machine learning.
Health care systems could warm to the technology, known as the Google Healthcare API, as new government mandates loom that will require them to make it easier for patients to see and use their health data.
“With … Cloud Healthcare API and our partner ecosystem, our goal is to make it as simple as possible for the industry to make informed, data-driven decisions, so that caregivers can focus on what matters most: saving lives,” wrote Google in a blog post and product page. “With Google Cloud’s … analytics and machine learning tools, you can simplify custom machine learning model training, and rapidly develop, test, and deploy production-grade ML models. You can also leverage Cloud Healthcare API’s … [tools] to store the outputs of these [machine learning] models and integrate them into existing clinical workflows.”
As Google notes, even in the best of circumstances, collating data is often a challenge for health care and life science organizations. The API, then, enables providers to interact with data using endpoints and health plans that scale while supporting interoperability, security, and patient access.
Earlier, Google launched a website dedicated to coronavirus updates in India and tweaked its search engine and YouTube to prominently display authoritative information and locally relevant details about the pandemic from the nation’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the company said on Monday.
Additionally, Google is also showing more than 1,500 food and night shelters in about three dozen cities in India on Google Maps and Search to guide people in need, it said. Millions of migrant daily-wage workers in India recently started to head to their home towns as their work disappeared after New Delhi ordered a 21-day lockdown across the nation last month to fight the spread of the infectious disease.
Cloud Healthcare API’s public launch comes a year after the service’s debut in beta and two years after its initial unveiling, a timeline roughly coinciding with a push by the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information to encourage the use of APIs to promote health care interoperability, as a part of the 2016 21st Century Cures Act.