Cloud Healthcare API allows the ease of ingesting complex data and provides it a unified access
– Amit Zavery, VP & Head of Platform and Aashima Gupta, Head of Healthcare Strategy & Solutions, Google Cloud
Our recent guests in The Big Unlock podcast were Amit Zavery, VP & Head of Platform and Aashima Gupta, Head of Healthcare Strategy & Solutions at Google Cloud. They discuss the new Cloud Healthcare API platform and how Google Cloud is enabling organizations with digital transformation and organizational efficiencies with Paddy Padmanabhan, CEO of Damo Consulting on the Big Unlock Podcast.
Listen to the full conversation
“We work very closely with many industries, and healthcare is one of the top ones where we have been providing them a lot of technology to run their different systems today. That could include being able to run their applications on top of our infrastructure, be able to connect those applications together using a lot of the technology we provide for backend connectivity, to be able to modernize those applications and really get the benefits of the latest technologies.” – Amit Zavery at The Big Unlock podcast
“Google cloud is now becoming much more industry-focused and healthcare is one of the industries in the overall Google cloud portfolio. Our mission for healthcare is very similar and a reflection on Google’s overall mission, which is to connect that information and make it accessible and useful. We have adopted that for healthcare, and for our customers and the enterprises, to help them connect that information and make it accessible and useful. So, when I say connect, that is where the API is coming. When we say useful, that’s where AI/machine learning comes in because the data needs to be connected and made more useful.” – Aashima at The Big Unlock podcast
Cloud Healthcare API: an engine where all the data from different sources are collected
“Our hope for the Cloud Healthcare API is ingestion of different industry-standard data sources and providing a managed service so that data can get hosted onto the cloud as a managed service. We are teaching cloud to speak the healthcare industry language. So, we speak HL7 and FHIR, clinical core components which represent 80% of use cases from the healthcare standpoint.” – Aashima
“We can now allow operators to put a lot of policies to those who access the data as required. And we are able to track it all the way, end to end, so that you have the ability to introspect and find out what happened and when and eventually make it available to people who need to have it in an easy way. And then you have systems in place with the IT groups and the business practitioners, analysts who can now run this thing and operate it in a much smarter way.” – Amit
Cloud is a cornerstone; a means to create meaningful applications
Amit shares that they are observing a lot of customers in the healthcare sector who are using API management and Apigee tool, a Google acquired product that can manage API gateway and make it easier to produce and deploy modern, developer-friendly apps. Also, digital transformation is becoming a huge requirement by the healthcare customers. Digitizing the whole complex healthcare processes is the fastest growing area in the industry.
“When we say cloud is a cornerstone of the foundation, it is a means to an end to create more meaningful applications. As the data is coming into the cloud and we are looking into building an application ecosystem or creating meaningful applications, the healthcare industry needs more examples of implementations like theirs, the work that we talked about was the crux of it. We need to do it in a governed, secure way and it is very important to get that implementation rigor in the engine. Apigee provides that secure gateway to connect to that information with the right analytics and the right reporting, knowing which API is public, which are private, and which are for your partners and building that robust operating model for API lifecycle is critical.” – Aashima
“There is a lot of interest in healthcare when it comes to the adoption of API management, especially now where you want to have efficiency, you want to have things which are connected well in a business process, which is little more digitized. It is also opening the ability to collaborate and share things between different pieces of the ecosystem and is becoming top of mind for many healthcare customers I speak to nowadays. And the number of projects we are seeing now with Apigee in healthcare has gone up considerably. This was moving slow earlier, but now I think has gotten faster. Healthcare is a bit late in the journey but accelerated very much over the last couple of years.” – Amit
Google Cloud’s approach towards COVID-19
In the current unprecedented times when there is a lot of burden on the healthcare providers, Google Cloud has a list of targeted solutions towards the pandemic situation. They enable the healthcare organizations with conversational AI that can work like a digital triage which can reduce in-person visits by telemedicine. Aashima believes that the healthcare industry is observing a digital acceleration and will change in the most profound ways.
“We are taking our targeted solutions for COVID-19 to the market by helping researchers; they range from offering the very basic level the cloud credit for leading researchers, then helping with a Kaggle competition, which is another unit in Google cloud, really bringing in the innovators and leading AI researchers to look into the data and help with the forecasting. The third thing that we have done is the solution for healthcare focused Chatbot, we have a solution which is cloud AI. It Is a conversational engine.” – Aashima
“I think with the COVID situation healthcare industry is probably going to get transformed even faster. So, we are here to kind of collaborate and partner and work to see how we can help. After we come out of the COVID-19 crisis, we will continue doing what we have been talking about for some time. The clarity which we have been providing to our customers has been straightforward in terms of how our innovation can help the healthcare industry. And that is really the long-term goal to the growth plan here.”
