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AASHIMA GUPTA: Hello, I'm Aashima Gupta.
I lead Healthcare Strategy and Solutions at Google Cloud.
I'm excited to have the honor of presenting today
at our first Next OnAir.
Many of you in healthcare have been
working extremely long hours, supporting the front line
workers, and ensuring everyone is getting the care they need,
directly or indirectly.
For that, we thank you tremendously.
To say that COVID-19 has been transformational
for the healthcare industry would be
a significant understatement.
Few aspects of the healthcare industry
have gone untouched in recent months
as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe.
It has pushed the inevitable telemedicine revolution forward
by a decade, if not more.
The pandemic has also placed immense pressure
on emergency rooms and intensive care units,
highlighting the need for scaling up infrastructure.
New care models are taking advantage of AI machine
learning to improve care delivery and decision making.
And finally, never before have so
many of the world's researchers focused so
urgently on a single topic.
We are in an extraordinary moment.
Technology has been shaping the world's response
to the coronavirus, and it will continue to do so.
Today, I want to share three areas
where we are working to help the healthcare community.
First, we are focused on helping people
access COVID-19 information.
Second, we are supporting hospitals and researchers
in the fight against COVID-19.
And finally, we are working alongside our customers who
are taking this moment to build a strong foundation
for the future.
Let me start by sharing some of the ways
we are helping people access COVID-19 information.
As many folks know, Google was founded on the idea
that bringing more information to more people
improves lives on a vast scale.
This mission transcends to healthcare.
For many people, the healthcare journey starts and continues
with Search.
In this historic moment, access to the right information
at the right time will save lives, period.
At Google Search and YouTube, we have been directing users
to critical information from recognized health authorities.
And through our Alphabet company,
Verily, we are providing COVID-19 testing in 13 states
and counting.
In addition to Search and YouTube,
we have released COVID-19 community mobility reports,
which use aggregated and anonymized data to provide
public health authorities with insights that
can help them make critical decisions
in the fight against COVID-19.
The reports chart movement trends over time
by geography across different categories of places,
such as retail, recreation, groceries, pharmacies, parks,
transit stations, workplaces, and residential.
We hope these insights will add to other public information
that will help people and communities stay
healthy and safe.
But our work has gone beyond our consumer products.
Here at Cloud, we have worked closely
with hospitals and researchers to advance their efforts
to fight COVID-19.
Healthcare innovation has become part of the new normal.
What might have been done in 10 years
has been done in 10 weeks.
Our tools and solutions, like Chrome Enterprise and G Suite,
which supports HIPAA compliance, have
helped form a safe and critical link between the healthcare
setting and families, helping patients connect
with loved ones in the ICUs, and allowing grandparents
to meet the grandchild minutes after birth.
For me personally, this has been particularly gratifying.
From the earliest days of my health IT career,
I have seen how technology can be
perceived as getting in between doctor-patient relationships.
We've all seen the images of doctors
staring at the EMR at the expense of eye
contact with the patient.
Now I'm seeing technology as the connection
point, more than just a tool, but a way
to enable and humanize our interaction
during these times of intense vulnerability or joy.
In addition, driven by new regulatory guidelines
and reimbursement structures, we have
seen both providers and patients dive
headfirst into telemedicine.
As an example, both Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic
have gone from providing thousands
of virtual visits per month before the pandemic
to hundreds of thousands now across a broad range
of demographics and conditions.
According to a recent op-ed in "The New York
Times," at Cleveland Clinic, 94% of diabetes patients
were cared for virtually in April.
We anticipate telemedicine will fundamentally
alter care delivery in the US.
And we are proud to have a tool, Google Meet, that will help
providers meet this new demand.
We believe that technology such as Google Meet
has tremendous potential for promoting
health equity in healthcare access
to populations that may be underserved
by the traditional healthcare system.
One example of a customer that has embraced
Google tools to increase health access and equity
is Cambridge Health Alliance, a health system
with 140,000 patients in Boston's Metro North region.
Beyond G Suite for internal collaboration,
CHA is using Google's free HIPAA-enabled Meet
for telemedicine.
Now, Meet is built on Google Cloud's
enterprise-grade security, and the telemedicine solution
was made available in just a few weeks in response to COVID.
To date, CHA has already conducted more than 12,000
telemedicine sessions.
Another innovation was an effort with Google Nest in Mount Sinai
Hospital in New York City.
As the virus reached peak levels,
Google Nest set up a console that enabled nurses
to livestream a feed from an inpatient unit
and initiate communication with patients.
This helped to cut down the number of times
medical teams had to enter patient rooms,
allowing them to preserve protective personal equipment.
Times like this offer a good reminder
that a collaboration is what will
help transform health care.
The National Response Portal, built in partnership
with SADA and HCA Healthcare, brought together
stakeholders from the industry, the public sector,
the US hospital systems to understand data
around ICU bed availability, ventilator supply, and test
results, in an effort to help hospitals and communities
prepare and respond.
In addition, many of our healthcare provider and payer
customers have been overwhelmed by inquiries
from patients and members.
For organizations that are struggling
with the volume of incoming calls and questions,
we created Rapid Response Virtual Agent.
This tool is helping organizations like University
of Pennsylvania provide immediate responses to patients
and disseminate accurate information quickly
during this critical time, taking
the burden off overworked health hotlines and call centers.
Another area of focus has been on helping
researchers and clinicians find treatments for COVID-19.
To forward this goal, we have made numerous COVID-19-related
research datasets available.
And we are working closely with the Harvard Global Health
Institute to distribute over $20 million
in cloud credits for COVID-focused research.
One critical element of how we respond to this crisis
is the development of new medicines to fight COVID-19.
To accelerate this drug discovery process,
Schrodinger, a Google Cloud customer,
has teamed up with Takeda, Novartis, Gilead Sciences,
and WuXi AppTec in a philanthropic initiative
to share ideas, resources, and data
with a goal of developing antiviral therapeutics
for coronavirus.
We are supporting the alliance by providing
16 million hours of GPU time to power a broad exploration
of chemical space, and widen the hunt for effective therapies.
This has the potential to considerably accelerate
preclinical drug discovery processes for COVID-19.
Healthcare data has never been more important.
COVID-19 has underscored the need for data accessibility.
We recently launched Healthcare API
in general availability, which allows an organization
to ingest and manage key data from a range of inputs
and systems, and then better understand
the data through the application of analytics and machine
learning in real time and at scale.
We are committed to protecting the privacy of your data
and your customers' data.
The Healthcare API supports, number one,
de-identifying data at the dataset, FHIR store
and the DICOM store level.
Second, encryption of the data.
Three, we also offer External Key Manager
to create and manage external keys.
We have also created and shared Google Cloud Trust Principles
publicly.
As you know, privacy of healthcare data
is extremely critical.
We are confident that these tools will further
the industry's interoperability goals by providing
a secure and compliant way to continue to share information
even after the urgency of COVID-19 has lessened.
These are just some of the amazing examples we've
seen over the past few weeks.
Our team is working hard to make sure our customers have
the right technology and support in place to navigate
this challenging time.
In addition to this work, we are partnering closely
with the industry to imagine what it
will look like post-COVID-19.
To talk more about these changes,
and how Google is working closely
with leading health care systems,
I spoke with Dr. John Halamka.
Pleased to have you here with us at Cloud Next, Dr. Halamka.
Can you please tell us briefly about your role at the Mayo
Clinic?
JOHN HALAMKA: Sure, as president of Mayo Clinic Platform,
I lead a portfolio of digital platform businesses focused
on transforming health by leveraging
AI, Internet of Things, and an ecosystem of partners
for Mayo Clinic.
AASHIMA GUPTA: We are facing a global crisis.
The decisions leaders like yourself will make over
the coming weeks will shape the world for years to come.
What innovation do you think will have the biggest impact?
JOHN HALAMKA: Wow, it's tough question.
But I think COVID-19 is pushing us
toward a digital-first healthcare delivery
system, care in the home, telemetry from the home.
I think that healthcare will be 60% or more virtual
across all modalities of delivery in this new normal.
AASHIMA GUPTA: One basis for taking
this decision is the availability of the right data.
How are you tackling that challenge in Mayo Clinic?
JOHN HALAMKA: So remember, I'm a clinician.
And so the challenge in 2020 is we have too much data
and not enough wisdom.
And so we're getting a huge velocity
of signals, our phones, our wearables, the medical record.
And we need to be able to organize that and analyze that,
and deliver to our clinicians, to our patients,
to all of our stakeholders what they need
to know that is actionable.
And so to me, partnership between Mayo and Google
gives us that opportunity to take so much noise
and find the signal.
AASHIMA GUPTA: In many ways, COVID paints a bleak scenario.
But there is also high hopes of how we
will emerge from this crisis.
Whether it's telehealth or remote work,
we're grateful for the chance this technology has given us.
How do you see the scope of telehealth and virtual care
evolving at the Mayo Clinic?
JOHN HALAMKA: So when you look at this new normal,
post-COVID, what you recognize is
we're going to have some kinds of care that
are asynchronous store and forward, you know?
Let's see, is that mole a cancerous lesion?
I'll send a picture.
Some will be a virtual visit.
Some will be higher acuity care in the home
than we've ever delivered before.
We could even deliver ICU care remotely.
And so what we know is that all of these new approaches
are going to require a stack of technologies
that are highly secure, and highly robust, and easy to use.
And so everything that I plan, as I
look at my 2030 transformation work at Mayo Clinic,
is taking every department, and taking
every clinical condition, and taking every use case,
and figuring out how to digitize it,
not for the sake of digitization,
but to improve the patient experience,
improve the provider experience, and ensure privacy
along the way.
In that new normal, 60% of our interactions provider
to patient is probably going to be some aspect of virtual.
AASHIMA GUPTA: Thank you, Dr. Halamka.
And thank you for all the work that you
and the other front line healthcare workers
have done during this crisis.
As we begin to transition out of the first wave of this pandemic
and begin to prepare for the second and third waves,
now's the time for all of us, the IT workers, the computer
scientists, the researchers, the engineers, and many others
to step up to meet the new set of demands that
have emerged due to COVID-19.
That's why we at Google Cloud are
focused on building new solutions to help healthcare
organizations to adapt this new world.
Our solutions focus on telehealth, interoperability,
hospital impact forecasting, and biomedical computing
are specifically tuned to the industry
and its unique challenges.
Here in the Healthcare Life Sciences Team at Google Cloud,
we feel very fortunate to play a small role
in helping healthcare communities tackle
the pandemic.
Over the course of the next few weeks,
we will be sharing more on our healthcare offerings
in our breakout series.
So do tune in for those, and you can sign up in advance
through our healthcare session catalogue.
The world of healthcare is filled
with tremendous opportunities.
Technology can help.
However, it's very important to remember
that tech is just an amplifier.
It scales what problems you apply it to.
We look forward to continuing to work with all of you,
solving those problems as we all adjust
to new ways of conducting research,
developing and delivering medicines, and providing care.
Thank you.
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