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Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain

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Re: Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain

#51

Post by BadInformatics »

clusterhacks wrote: post #6

I work as a data engineer in an academic medical research institution. Most electronic medical records (EMR) systems are really about billing. Yes, there are clinically relevant data fields available but a large amount of what we were after as researchers was only available in free-text. Data abstraction is still mostly a human-expert driven activity. It would be fun if that could be better automated but there is sig…

IME the billing-centric view is mostly a US-centric view. If you talk to folks who've done EHR deployments in other countries (my dataset is mostly Canada/UK), a not insignificant amount of work is put into tweaking Epic/Cerner/etc. _away_ from being so billing focused. Your other points still resonate, though anecdotally I've seen less private sector interest in doing analysis over providing infrastructure or other COTS software here.

Re: Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain

#52

Post by BadInformatics »

joshuakelly wrote: post #43
Spivak wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean they kinda do since lots and lots of systems support HL7 which can best be described as "JSON but so so so much worse" or "CSV with '|' kinda."

This is a bit of a simplification. HL7 is the standards body, not the standard itself - which (for everyone else who may not know) is "HL7 v2". FHIR is an actually-JSON (+XML) health data protocol that is gaining adoption (most recently because of CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule), so it's not all bad.

Prior to FHIR, there was actually an XML-based HL7 v3 as well. Mercifully, it collapsed under the weight of its own spec and rarely shows up in the wild these days. CDA still survives, but it's much easier to work with and being slowly made obsolete by FHIR resources.

Re: Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain

#53

Post by QuercusMax »

throwaway3699 wrote: post #44
pilotneko wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concern wasn't about ads, it was about patient privacy. You guys basically put together a search engine for medical encounters, allowing physicians to access medical records they shouldn't be able to: https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-googles-project-nighting...

Can you elaborate more? I don't believe the search engine produced did not let physicians access anything they weren't supposed to. This is well stated in their public documentation.

The feature which seems to be freaking people out is sound-alike searching based on patient name. This isn't a new feature at all; it's been specified as an optional feature in the DICOM standard for literally decades.

Re: Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain

#54

Post by adolph »

thebean11 wrote: post #35
clusterhacks wrote: post #6

I work as a data engineer in an academic medical research institution. Most electronic medical records (EMR) systems are really about billing. Yes, there are clinically relevant data fields available but a large amount of what we were after as researchers was only available in free-text. Data abstraction is still mostly a human-expert driven activity. It would be fun if that could be better automated but there is sig…

Pretty much all the numerical results in my chart (vitals, lab results etc) are stored numerically, and are importable / graphable in Apple Health.

Apple Health is a great example of using the FHIR standard to establish a personal health record.

Re: Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain

#55

Post by joshuakelly »

BadInformatics wrote: post #52
joshuakelly wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit of a simplification. HL7 is the standards body, not the standard itself - which (for everyone else who may not know) is "HL7 v2". FHIR is an actually-JSON (+XML) health data protocol that is gaining adoption (most recently because of CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule), so it's not all bad.

Prior to FHIR, there was actually an XML-based HL7 v3 as well. Mercifully, it collapsed under the weight of its own spec and rarely shows up in the wild these days. CDA still survives, but it's much easier to work with and being slowly made obsolete by FHIR resources.

I'm working on dev tools in this space. Care to exchange notes with me? Email is in profile.

Re: Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain

#56

Post by yhoneycomb »

wfhbata wrote: post #19
yhoneycomb wrote: post #3

For the unaware - this particular hospital chain (HCA) is super, super shady. It's a for-profit institution, which is alarming in and of itself when the bar for hospitals to be nonprofit is so low (and when most of the "non-profit" hospitals are essentially for profit institutions anyway.)

> when most of the "non-profit" hospitals are essentially for profit institutions anyway This sounds worse than a for-profit institution declaring itself as a for-profit institution. What is it about the chain that is “super, super shady”?

> HCA Inc. (formerly known as Columbia/HCA and HCA - The Healthcare Company) has agreed to pay the United States $631 million in civil penalties and damages arising from false claims the government alleged it submitted to Medicare and other federal health programs, the Justice Department announced today.

https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2003/June/03_civ_386....

Re: Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain

#57

Post by jcims »

dekhn wrote: post #47
jcims wrote: post #41

I wonder why this is coming out of Google and not Verily.

There is a whole division within Research called Google Health led by David Feinberg ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-feinberg-4b5b76/ ) which works on these sorts of problems. It's sort of situated between Cloud and Research, as many of the problems they want to solve are... well, research problems that need large real-world datasets to solve. Verily has its own things it wants to focus on, and I don't think larg…

Ah! That’s good info, thank you.

I applied for a job at Verily a while back out of a desire to pivot out of my current industry. Once I got up close to it though I had a little trouble sussing out how they would operate separate from Google, which I think is going to have to be the case eventually. Stuff like this just makes it even harder to see. (edit: I wonder if it has anything to do with patents/ip)

Everyone I actually talked to was great though and I wish then the best.

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