Aches and pains. What, if anything, is the difference between those? And do you know a “myocardial infarction” from a “heart attack”? What about an “MI”? Is that shorthand, or part of the address of a hospital in Michigan?

For people, it can be easy to understand the distinctions and nuances between similar words, phrases, and concepts, even technical ones, like those found throughout the medical field. Yet even for the most advanced AI, the contextual clues that give humans accurate comprehension of words and images remain an elusive challenge. It’s a challenge well worth solving, though: As much as 80% of all healthcare data is said to be unstructured.

It’s the kind of complicated data management challenge that natural language processing was built to solve.

Healthcare and life sciences organizations are generating vast amounts of unstructured data as part of clinical and operational workflows, which presents an enormous opportunity to derive meaningful insights for medical research, population health, and patient care. For example, clinical notes and lab reports have useful, actionable information that, when unlocked, can help improve the overall quality of patient care, accelerate the discovery of new treatments, and increase the efficiency of healthcare delivery.

This approach is at the heart of Google Cloud’s Healthcare Natural Language API, in enabling healthcare organizations to build open, intelligent systems that unlock value from healthcare data. The open cloud approach enables our partners to innovate more easily, and scale more efficiently. We believe this approach will further advance interoperability—and ultimately lead to healthier and fuller lives.

Unlockinging value from clinical documents and research materials
Over the past two years, we have seen just how powerful AI can be in expediting drug discovery efforts for COVID-19, forecasting and modeling COVID-19 cases, and building better models for a host of public health measures. The opportunities extend well beyond battling the pandemic, too, to helping combat cancers, diabetes, and disabilities, and accelerating drug discovery.

As healthcare and life sciences organizations look to incorporate new data sources in their analytics and AI workflows, Google Cloud has been investing in providing open, flexible, and easy to use API services that customers and partners can integrate into their solutions, to accelerate their development with the power of Google’s AI technology.

The Cloud Healthcare Natural Language API is one such example, and aims to provide fully managed services that deliver the latest advances in natural language processing in an easy to use and easy to integrate manner. Healthcare organizations can then build intelligent systems to improve care and reduce cost while not having to worry about the complexities of the underlying and fast-changing technology, thus enabling more open innovation in the development of healthcare applications.

A number of healthcare innovators are exploring the potential for natural language processing.

“Patients come to Mayo Clinic with a history, and that history is well-documented, but often buried in clinical notes. Extracting information from unstructured healthcare data across thousands of patients is a complex problem,” says Vish Anantraman, M.D., Chief Technology Officer at Mayo Clinic. “Custom natural language processing solutions have a great potential to extract higher quality insights from these notes and to deliver more timely, and holistic patient care.”

The best insights can often be the unexpected ones, and that is precisely what Hackensack Meridian Health, in northern New Jersey, is looking for.

“Doctor’s notes are a rich space to create structured information from their natural workflow,” says Michael Draugelis, vice president for predictive health at Hackensack Meridian Health. “We are designing new AI-powered solutions to connect clinical teams, patients, and the community automatically from these insights—without creating cumbersome screen clicks and prompts. This automation allows our clinical teams to focus on connecting with the patient.”

Hospital leaders there are testing Google’s NLP API to gather information such as social determinants of health and behavioral health signals from large amounts of clinical notes, with approximately 35 million processed. Seeking to achieve the greatest value from natural language processing, the team at Hackensack Meridian Health have specifically focused on extracting information that is inherently not easy to capture in more traditional electronic health records.

“The extracted insights from the Google NLP API creates a foundational component to map clinical protocols, pathways, and outcomes, to better understand and improve patient care,” Draugelis says.

And at the National Institutes of Health and elsewhere, researchers are exploring how natural-language-derived variables could offer an additional predictive value over and above the Veteran Health Administrations’s structured EMR-based suicide prediction model.

To help healthcare organizations achieve goals like the ones above, we at Google draw on the expertise of tens of thousands of data scientists across the company who work every day on building better AI and decades of AI research in language understanding to power the development of services such as the Cloud Healthcare Natural Language API.

According to independent benchmarking of Cloud providers offering fully managed healthcare natural language service by tech analysts GigaOm, the Google Cloud Healthcare Natural Language API was among the most accurate in the industry, outperforming other service providers in terms of correctly classified medical entities and relationships, and with very few misclassifications.

Using AI to connect systems and enhance healthcare interoperability

As an industry, healthcare and life sciences organizations have been talking about the importance of data and data interoperability for a while. But our experiences from the past couple years have demonstrated that we cannot be fully prepared for the next global health crisis without greater connections within and between organizations.

Starting with the Healthcare Data Engine, organizations have been integrating and harmonizing data securely across many of their sources—patients, members, operations, research, and public databases—so they can quickly analyze it to get insights, and then make smarter, faster decisions.

This is the start of a broader vision for a new kind of healthcare and life sciences connected world where enterprises, institutions, and startups will securely collaborate to deliver on the next generation of care. Such a future relies on cloud-based solutions that are as open and flexible as they are user-friendly, compliance-ready, and secure.

We envision a future where healthcare organizations can seamlessly connect data from various systems, unlock the value from data regardless of source or format, and break down barriers in healthcare interoperability and AI to improve healthcare and save lives.

With these goals in mind, we continue to enhance the hybrid data clouds that customers are building to organize and analyze their information, and we and our partners continue to build on our data capabilities. Given the complexities both within the field and within each organization, we believe the greatest value comes from having partners and tools available to build the AI and NLP technologies most relevant to your unique needs.

Google Cloud’s Professional Services Organization (PSO) engages with customers to ensure effective and efficient operations in the cloud, from the time they begin considering how cloud can help them overcome their operational, business or technical challenges, to the time they’re looking to optimize their cloud workloads. 

We know that all parts of the cloud journey are important and can be complex.  In this blog post, we want to focus specifically on the migration process and how PSO engages in a myriad of activities to ensure a successful migration.

As a team of trusted technical advisors, PSO will approach migrations in three phases:

1. Pre-Migration Planning
2. Cutover Activities
3. Post-Migration Operations

While this post will not cover in detail all of the steps required for a migration, it will focus on how PSO engages in specific activities to meet customer objectives, manage risk, and deliver value.  We will discuss the assets, processes and tools that we leverage to ensure success.

Pre-Migration Planning

Assess Scope

Before the migration happens, you will need to understand and clarify the future state that you’re working towards.  From a logistical perspective, PSO will be helping you with capacity planning to ensure sufficient resources are available for your envisioned future state.

While migration into the cloud does allow you to eliminate many of the considerations for the physical, logistical, and financial concerns of traditional data centers and co-locations, it does not remove the need for active management of quotas, preparation for large migrations, and forecasting.  PSO will help you forecast your needs in advance and work with the capacity team to adjust quotas, manage resources, and ensure availability. 

Once the future state has been determined, PSO will also work with the product teams to determine any gaps in functionality.  PSO captures feature requests across Google Cloud services and makes sure they are understood, logged, tracked, and prioritized appropriately with the relevant product teams.  From there, they work closely with the customer to determine any interim workarounds that can be leveraged while waiting for the feature to land, as well as providing updates on the upcoming roadmap.  

Develop Migration Approach and Tooling

Within Google Cloud, we have a library of assets and tools we use to assist in the migration process.  We have seen these assets help us successfully complete migrations for other customers efficiently and effectively.

Based on the scoping requirements and tooling available to assist in the migration, PSO will help recommend a migration approach.  We understand that enterprises have specific needs; differing levels of complexity and scale; regulatory, operational, or organization challenges that will need to be factored into the migration.  PSO will help customers think through the different migration options and how all of the considerations will play out.

PSO will work with the customer team to determine the best migration approach for moving servers from on-prem to Google Cloud. PSO will walk customers through different migration approaches, such as refactoring, lift-shift, or new installs. From there, the customer can determine the best fit for their migration. PSO will provide guidance on best practices and use cases from other customers with similar use cases. 

Google offers a variety of cloud native tools that can assist with asset discovery, the migration itself, and post-migration optimization. PSO, as one example, will help work with project managers to determine the best tooling that accommodates the customer’s requirements for migrating servers. PSO will also engage Google product team to ensure the customer fully understands the capabilities of each tool and the best fit for the use case. Google understands from a tooling perspective, one size does not fit all, thus PSO will work with the customer on determining the best migration approach and tooling for different requirements. 

Cutover Activities

Once all of the planning activities have been completed, PSO will assist in making sure the cutover is successful.

During and leading up to critical customer events, PSO can provide proactive event management services which deliver increased support and readiness for key workloads.  Beyond having a solid architecture and infrastructure on the platform, support for this infrastructure is essential and TAMs will help ensure that there are additional resources to support and unblock the customer where challenges arise.

As part of event management activities, PSO liaises with the Google Cloud Support Organization to ensure quick remediation and high resilience for situations where challenges arise.  A war room is usually created to facilitate quick communication about the critical activities and roadblocks that arise.  These war rooms can give customers a direct line to the support and engineering teams that will triage and resolve their issues.

Post-Migration Activities

Once cutover is complete, PSO will continue to provide support in areas such incident management, capacity planning, continuous operational support, and optimization to ensure the customer is successful from start to finish.

PSO will serve as the liaison between the customer and Google engineers. If support cases need to be escalated, PSO will ensure the appropriate parties are involved and work to get the case resolved in a timely manner. Through operational rigor, PSO will work with the customer in determining if certain Google Cloud services will be beneficial to the customer objectives. If services will add value to the customer, PSO will help enable the services so it aligns with the customer’s goal and current cloud architecture. In cases where there are missing gaps in services, PSO will proactively work with the customer and Google engineering teams to close the gaps by enabling additional functionality in the services.  

PSO will continue to work with the engineering teams to consistently review and provide recommendations on the customer’s cloud architecture in ensuring the most optimal and cost efficient design along with adhering to Google’s best practices guidelines. 

Aside from migrations, PSO is also responsible for providing continuous training of Google Cloud to customers. To ensure consistent development of Google Cloud, PSO will work with the customer to jointly develop a learning roadmap to ensure the customer has the necessary skills to succeed in delivering successful projects in Google Cloud.

Conclusion

Google PSO will be actively engaged throughout the customer’s cloud journey to ensure the necessary guidance, methodology, and tools are presented to the customer. PSO will engage in a series of activities from pre-migration planning to post migration in key areas such as capacity planning to ensure sufficient resources are allocated for future workloads to providing support on technical cases for troubleshooting. PSO will serve as a long-term trusted advisor who will be the voice of the  customer and provide the reliability and stability of the customer’s Google Cloud environment.

Click here if you’d like to engage with our PSO team on your migration. Or, you can also get started with a free discovery and assessment of your current IT landscape.