The Tennessee-based health system has migrated its data to a FHIR-based platform and now plans to use AI to address administrative and clinical efficiencies.
Community Health Systems has announced a collaboration to develop generative AI programs on Google Cloud.
The Tennessee-based health system, comprising 71 hospitals and more than 1,000 healthcare sites across 15 states, announced today that it has completed migration to a FHIR-based clinical data platform on Google Cloud.
“The goal of this migration extends well beyond modernizing our data infrastructure,“ Miguel Benet, MD, MPH, FACHE, CHS’ senior vice president of clinical operations, said in a press release. “By building a secure foundation to take advantage of new innovations in AI, we’re able to streamline our clinical providers’ workflow and advance the way we deliver patient care.”
Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are partnering with health systems and hospitals to develop enterprise-level AI programs, combining the data storage and analysis capabilities of the former with the clinical and administrative expertise of the latter. In December, Google unveiled a new suite of healthcare AI models called MedLM, built off the Med-PaLM 2 large language model introduced earlier in the year, as well as an early iteration of its next-gen generative AI model called Gemini.
One of Google’s biggest partners is HCA Healthcare, also based in Tennessee, which has been piloting Ai technology in Emergency Departments (through smartglasses) and to help nurses with documenting patient encounters.
“We’re on a mission to redesign the way care is delivered, letting clinicians focus on patient care and using technology where it can best support doctors and nurses,” Michael J. Schlosser, MD, MBA, FAANS, HCA’s senior vice president of care transformation and innovation, said in a press release. “Generative AI and other new technologies are helping us transform the ways teams interact, create better workflows, and have the right team, at the right time, empowered with the information they need for our patients.”
CHS is looking to build off its centralized data depository on Google Cloud’s health data platform to improve interoperability and drive real-time data analysis. The health system also plans on using Vertex AI and other large language models to target both administrative and clinical efficiencies, even pairing AI with Google Maps to give patients personalized resources in their communities.
Eric Wicklund is the associate content manager and senior editor for Innovation, Technology, and Pharma for HealthLeaders.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Community Health Systems, which comprises 71 hospitals and more than 1,000 sites of care, has integrated all of its data into one centralized platform on Google Cloud.
The project is one of several collaborations between health systems and tech giants aimed at combining the clinical expertise of the former and the enterprise-level data gathering and analysis capabilities of the latter.
With its data in the cloud, the health system will now use generative AI to address both back-office and clinical operations as well as help patients improve their care experience.