Fulfilling the promise of digital

A COLLABORATION BETWEEN ASCENSION AND GOOGLE PROVIDES ADVANCED DATA MANAGEMENT AND ELEVATES PATIENT CARE

Fulfilling the promise of digital health information

Since Ascension’s founding in 1999, we have been advancing a Vision that calls for the national health ministry to lead the transformation of healthcare.

Not content with merely identifying and following trends, leaders across Ascension have sought out progressive, disruptive innovations and transformational approaches that have the potential to further our Mission, in the tradition of the bold visionaries and innovators who made up Ascension’s historic sponsors.

In this tradition, Ascension is working with Google’s Health division, a global innovator in helping organizations get their arms around vast amounts of data to advance the organizations’ missions and better serve their constituencies.

THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT As the information age has accelerated, consumer expectations have changed rapidly, in many cases leaving traditional healthcare systems behind. Those we serve now expect, and increasingly demand, care that is delivered in a cost-efficient, convenient manner and with an exceptional experience. At the same time, the physicians and caregivers who live out our healing Mission every day do it because they are committed to improving care for those we serve and to making individuals and communities healthier. Unfortunately, the technology created to improve our ability to deliver excellent care too often creates barriers in our ability to do just that. Technology developments have

made work easier for just about every other industry. But in healthcare, technology has made many aspects of serving our patients more difficult.

CONVERTING DATA TO INFORMATION Effectively caring for patients requires not only having the right information at the right time for each patient but also having that information presented in a way that is easily read and understood. This is even more relevant today as healthcare delivery transforms and the amount of patient information increases.

The information clinicians need spans the care continuum with increasing complexity and scale. Too often, clinical information is buried in siloed electronic and paper records that are scattered across hospitals, clinics, urgent care centers, pharmacies, physician offices and labs, making it difficult to deliver coordinated and precise care. When the information is finally retrieved, often it is poorly organized, fragmented and challenging for clinicians to effectively use to care for patients.

The fact that today’s electronic health record (EHR) systems don’t talk to each other is a major problem that can have serious consequences for patient care and causes caregiver frustration and burnout. Today, too

much of a caregiver’s time is taken up hunting through poorly organized EHRs trying to find important clinical information — time that could be better used to provide patient care.

A NEW APPROACH To empower our caregivers to provide safer, more effective and efficient care, we are testing point-of-care tools for our clinicians to quickly have access to more complete and specifically tailored patient data. In the delivery of these capabilities, our patients’ records will continue to be securely protected just as they always have been.

With Ascension privacy and security protections in place to protect patients’ health information, Ascension doctors and nurses are working with Google to test a secure clinical search capability that will bring the information within a patient’s entire medical record to our clinicians’ fingertips.

The clinicians will be able to specify the exact information they’re looking for, and it will be retrieved quickly and in combination with other clinically relevant data. For example, rather than hunting through an EHR to see if a patient had a previous allergic or intolerance reaction to a drug, a clinician could simply query the consolidated clinical data and have any instance of allergy or intolerance to that drug presented to them. This capability can be vitally important in emergency situations, when timeliness and completeness of information can be crucial in saving a patient’s life. The private clinical search capability tool will not be generally available for use in the clinical setting until it is ready, and patients’ medical records will continue to be subject to Ascension’s extensive privacy and security protections and policies both during development and when the tool is introduced. Our patients’ data will be accessible only to our clinicians. Under no circumstances is Google allowed to use this data for other purposes or to combine it with any other Google consumer data.

Ascension’s work with Google

OUR COLLABORATION WITH GOOGLE FALLS INTO FOUR AREAS 1. Infrastructure — moving Ascension’s data into a private, secure Google Cloud environment that is controlled by Ascension. Google is providing cloud space but is not viewing, accessing, searching or using patient information for its own purposes. 2. G Suite — transitioning our associates to Google’s G Suite productivity tools (see page 10). 3. Healthcare Information Layer — bringing patient data together across silos, with mapping, harmonizing and consolidating the data from all of Ascension’s separate information sources to provide clinicians with a complete patient record. Google will assist us with normalizing the combined data into a common data model, enabling comprehensive search by Ascension clinicians to help them make the best recommendations and decisions for their patients. 4. Healthcare Experience Layer — creating applications that maximally leverage access to, and understanding of, the integrated patient individual dataset so care may be optimized for individuals and communities.

All of this work is being done securely and in a way that protects patient privacy, with strict security protocols and in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), including being governed by an industry-standard Business Associate Agreement.

THE PROMISE OF EHRS Since 2005, tens of billions of dollars have been spent on the creation of siloed, clunky EHR systems. The Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology have outlined bold visions to finally make the health information in our systems interoperable, while ensuring patient privacy consistent with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). We have accepted the challenge.

Ascension is working hard to improve patient care; that is what this is all about. To do that, we need all of our patients’ health information securely available, accessible and easily understood by those who are providing care, at the point of care. Google is helping us do that. This new capability keeps our eye firmly on this crucial goal: having the right information at the right time for each patient.

This groundbreaking work will improve the experience of patients and consumers, as well as caregivers. We’re excited about this opportunity to invest in technology-enabled services that address the toughest healthcare problems facing our nation and will help Ascension lead the transformation of healthcare.