Google Health – Tools to help healthcare providers deliver better care

Hi, I’m Alvin. I’m a Product Manager here at Google and a practicing doctor in Internal Medicine. Our goal is to restore the joy of caregiving and redefine how physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and more, operate. We want to enable them to operate at the top of their license, encouraging high-quality and high value care. Today, healthcare data is siloed and innovation to improve the clinical experience is hard.  The tools for frontline clinicians are clerical and sub-optimal for decision making.  We need modern tools that are a joy to use.
Doctors and nurses spend half their day in the electronic health record, and they often have to log into multiple systems with multiple usernames and multiple passwords rather than seeing all the information in a single place. This makes accessing the information they need burdensome, and even when they do get to the data, they are often confronted with information overload,  and they don’t have the tools to quickly and easily find what they are looking for. We’re excited to share with you what we’ve been working on here at Google Health.
The chart you’re going to see is synthetic, meaning it’s not real patient data. The product is currently in development and early clinical pilots. It’s not yet available for clinical use. With a single log-in, doctors can access a unified view of data normally spread across multiple systems. All the types of information clinicians need are assembled together, such as the vitals, labs, medications, and notes. Clicking on any value will start a deeper exploration, showing recent and historical trends, both graphically and with tables.
Doctors can query the entire chart with their own words and typos.  Results are not strict keyword matches. A variety of Google technologies are used to identify related concepts, such as coagulopathy and thrombocytopenia. Clinical shorthands works too. You can search abx for antibiotics, and we’ll return the administered antibiotics and mentions of them in the note below.
To reduce the number of clicks, clinicians can jump directly to any part of the chart with a simple search, such as vitals or notes. Key information, like the latest admission note, known as an H&P,  are also just a few keystrokes away. Text is often copied and pasted from prior notes, obscuring fresh from stale information. Copy-forwarded text is automatically detected in grey and the source is shown on hover.
Documentation is a major pain point for physicians.  To help, we’ve adapted SmartCompose from Gmail complete common clinical phrases. As clinicians write in different sections of the note, relevant information will be shown on the right hand side, and tricky to enter or spell information is automatically made easier to enter. As clinicians type about lab tests, relevant results will automatically be shown on the right hand side.
We’ll even try to successfully complete, grammatically, what the clinician wants type and enter the right piece of information. Similar proactive assistance works for reports, such as the chest x-ray,  where we’ll show the full report and after you enter it, you can go back to see it at any time point. Last, and this is my favorite feature, you’ll even be able to search for information in scanned documents.
And those faxes, even when they’re handwritten, we’ll still find the information for you. We want to empower clinicians by making it easier to access complex, clinical data with tools that are delightful to use. We want to make the work of caring for patients, like documenting your thoughts,  more efficient and seamless. We’re excited to work with doctors and nurses on our collective mission of delivering the best possible care for all patients.