Telehealth Improves Patient and Clinical Experiences across Continuum of Care
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According to a National Academy of Medicine discussion paper, social determinants of health (SDoH) account for upwards of 80% of a population’s health outcomes. Breaking this down further, 50% come just from socioeconomic and physical environment factors such as education, employment, income, family and social support, community safety, air and water quality, and access to housing and transit. SDoH determine access to and quality of healthcare, and are contributors to a system of disparate access to care.
We believe that to more efficiently provide comprehensive healthcare access to more people, providers will leverage technology to blend in-person and virtual modes of care delivery.
In this article, Amwell and Google Cloud examine five ways telehealth – as part of a provider’s overall care model – can help democratize access to healthcare. (graphic url)
Remove distance as a barrier to care
8.6 million Americans live more than 30 minutes from their nearest hospital. Long drives can deter patients from seeking care or maintaining routine visits. On the flip side, 92% of Americans nationwide have access to wired broadband in the home or through mobile broadband. Therefore, having a virtual visit just a click away can help remove barriers to care, like distance.
Eliminate the risk of unnecessary exposure
Virtual care means that patients don’t have to worry about potential exposure in transit, while sitting in waiting rooms, or from direct interactions during in-person health visits. This is particularly relevant when it comes to those with chronic diseases or underlying conditions. Telehealth provides patients who may be more susceptible to diseases with access to continuous healthcare without putting them at higher risk for developing more severe symptoms. Virtual visits can occur in the comfort –and safety– of patients’ homes.
Extend access to specialized care
55% of preventable hospitalization or mortality in rural settings is due to lack of access to specialty care. With telehealth, physical proximity to specialized services–typically in urban areas–can be reduced as a limiting factor. Virtual solutions grant everyone access to top specialists, regardless of location.
Save time and money
By augmenting in-person visits with telehealth applications, providers can benefit from greater efficiencies in scheduling, helping to improve their bottom line, and add more flexibility to their workday. Meanwhile, patients can spend less on travel and childcare, limit time taken off work, and save on other costs associated with in-person visits — for a savings of $35 to $690 per visit. In a survey by the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition, 76% of the 2,000+ patients surveyed across the US responded that transportation was removed as a barrier, 65% reported they no longer had to take time off from work for an appointment, and 67 percent reporting lower costs than an in-person visit.
Combat physician shortage and fatigue
Research shows there will be a shortage of more than 100,000 doctors by 2030. In the midst of a physician shortage, telehealth can help improve care delivery and make it more efficient, ensuring more people can still have their healthcare needs addressed. Additionally, by integrating intelligence such as case triaging along with telehealth into a virtual care model, providers can help reduce clinician burnout.
Amwell and Google Cloud are partnering to deliver transformative telehealth solutions that will make it easier for more patients to receive care and improve patient and clinician experiences across the continuum of care. One example includes embedding real-time captioning and translation services powered by Google Cloud’s AI and NLP technologies within the Amwell platform to increase health access and understanding for more people.
As physicians, we are excited that the future of healthcare will continue to blend cloud technologies like EHR-integrated telehealth platforms, AI, healthcare-trained virtual agents along with in-person care to create an integrated hybrid care model that will improve patient outcomes and unburden providers, all while expanding access to broader patient populations.
To learn more, download the whitepaper “Healthcare’s Virtual Transformation,” written in conjunction with Becker’s Hospital Review.
1: “Social Determinants of Health 101 for Health Care: Five Plus Five,” National Academy of Medicine, October 2017
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FinOps is a concept similar to DevOps, but with a different set of goals. Cloud FinOps is an operational framework and cultural shift that brings together technology, finance and business to drive financial accountability and accelerate business value realization. In layman terms, FinOps aims to help companies achieve most out of every dollar invested on cloud technology. It includes a broad set of existing and net-new processes or frameworks that breaks silos across functions, and build a better working model to achieve collaboration, agility, ownership and value.
Rest your anxieties about the changes in mindset and organizational behavior around current financial management practices while taking full flexibility benefits of cloud. Ease your cloud migration journey and value realization as experts at Google Cloud have shared best-practices, insights and action items to implement FinOps on Google Cloud in this whitepaper. Download now!
Earth Week: Google Cloud at the Heart of Sustainability
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Today’s Google Doodle reminds us of the enormous changes our planet is experiencing due to climate change. Everyone, from businesses to governments to technologists, has the opportunity to meet this challenge — transforming themselves and their organizations to be more sustainable. For this Earth Day 2022, and indeed Earth Week, Google Cloud celebrates the organizations and individuals who are fighting climate change with innovative technology. We don’t want you to miss a thing, so here’s a recap of all our news in one handy location.
We asked global CEOs: what is it going to take to make progress on sustainability in your org?
In a survey of 1,500 CXOs across 16 countries, many executives say they are willing to do what it takes to have more sustainable practices. But despite their ambition, real measures of impact are lacking. To see what will change that, check out the blog.
We announced a new innovation challenge supporting climate science and research…
Our blog on Monday announced the Climate Innovation Challenge Research Credits program, to support researchers as they work to better understand climate change, increase climate resilience and develop new, promising solutions to urgent climate challenges. You can apply for research credits here.
…and shared stories of researchers making a difference
We interviewed Dr. Richard Fernandes from Natural Resources Canada, who built the LEAF toolbox that maps and assesses vegetation with satellite data from Google Earth Engine. You can read our Q&A here.
Canada has approximately 10 million square kilometers of land and the annual data volume of these maps is equivalent to streaming HD movies for over 750 hours non-stop. Cloud computing allows us to manage all this data in a useful and accessible way.Dr. Fernandes, Research Scientist
We also published a story about the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, and how they use Google Cloud processing and analysis tools to help sustainably manage 193 million acres of land.
We turned the lights on at new clean energy projects in four countries…
We shared details of our battery project in Belgium, solar projects in Denmark, and wind projects in Chile and Finland. Our battery project in Belgium is the first of its kind, enabling us to switch from diesel generators to a cleaner backup solution that will keep the internet up and running in the event of a power disruption. These will all help us continue to operate the cleanest cloud in the industry.
…and made it easier to learn how to build applications more sustainably
We launched a new lab that walks users through our Carbon Sense suite of products. From using our region picker app to make low-carbon architecture decisions, to analyzing the carbon footprint of your Google Cloud app with Carbon Footprint, we’re building sustainability into the tools you use every day. You can also find Carbon Footprint training in the new Data Warehouse Cloud On-Board.
We formed an ecosystem of partners to help accelerate sustainability projects…
The Google Cloud partner ecosystem is critical to helping our customers act sustainably today. A new whitepaper produced in partnership with Enterprise Strategy Group shares real-world solutions that could make an immediate impact — not in the next decade, but right now.
…and shared stories of innovative startups changing the game with Google Cloud.
Take Enexor and its partners, who are producing clean and sustainable energy from discarded plastics and agro-waste. The blog from Lee Jestings, Enexor Founder & CEO, shares how Google for Startups got them started, and which Google Cloud tools help them build predictive models. Check out their story.
Or Nuuly, the rental and resale business created by the URBN portfolio, which also includes Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People. In the blog you can read how Nuuly is using technology to provide a sustainable experience to employees and customers — from upcycling clothing, to recyclable and reusable packaging.
Whether you’re a startup, scientist, executive or developer, at Google Cloud we’ll continue to work hard to help make your digital transformation a sustainable one.
Learn more about our sustainability work here, and don’t miss the inaugural Cloud Sustainability Summit this June. Register now.
YoungCapital CIO: Why I Moved to Google Cloud and G Suite to Grow Our Business
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When your business is rapidly adding new employees, expanding to new countries, and always focused on staying ahead of the competition, you have to take a hard look at the tools that are slowing you down—and swap them out for better ones that can keep pace with the company. We’re expanding YoungCapital in Germany, which means more offices, more people, and more technology to make the business run smoothly.
As we scale, Google Cloud tools like Chromebooks and G Suite help us grow our business efficiently. They free us up from sluggish, time-intensive technology that’s hard to maintain and repair, and give us the freedom to work together in faster, smarter ways.
Free from hours of device setup. Some months, there are as many as 40 new employees starting at YoungCapital—and as we continue to expand that number will continue to rise, especially now that we’ve opened three new offices in Germany. With our old Windows desktops, setting up new computers could take up to an hour per employee (which can add up to about 40 hours a month for IT). Today, using Chrome Enterprise tools, it takes about five minutes to get an Acer Spin or Pixelbook ready to hand off to a new hire—saving us more than three months per year of device setup time.
Free from VPNs. Our previous Windows machines required a complicated virtual private network (VPN) for accessing corporate files outside of the office. Using a VPN was complicated for our employees because the software wasn’t intuitive; if an employee had trouble signing into the VPN while at home or traveling, they could not log in and work as quickly as they needed to. With Chromebooks, all you need is an online connection to sign into G Suite to access files and work from anywhere.
From our perspective, Chromebooks are resistant to threats like ransomware and phishing attacks, giving us confidence that our data can stay secure. With Chrome Enterprise Upgrade, our IT admins can strengthen security even further: for example, by enabling advanced security features that help block vulnerabilities, locking down lost or stolen devices right away, and setting device security policies in the cloud so devices everywhere are safer.
Free from infrastructure. We used to have to invest in servers, and then add more time and money to keep them running. Now we don’t have to run the business on infrastructure or hire people to maintain it—we can just use Google’s cloud. NextNovate is helping us make the most of Google Cloud Platform, like integrating some of our proprietary applications with G Suite and building our own add-ons. For example, we created a button for Gmail that connects to our job candidate database; when candidates email us, we can click on the button and see their profiles and work experience.
Free from multiple passwords and logins. Chrome Browser and G Suite with single sign-provider SAML are the portal to all the productivity apps our employees need. Once people log in to G Suite, they don’t have to remember a bunch of other user names and passwords. The IT team loves it too, because we don’t have to spend hours zeroing out passwords and creating new ones.
Free to manage cross-country devices easily in the cloud. Our four-person IT support team, which keeps our systems humming, hasn’t grown, even though we’ve doubled the number of employees. When we were on Windows devices, we fielded roughly 1,800 IT support requests every month. Now we get about 1,300 requests a month, from a much bigger employee base. This translates to nearly 30% fewer requests for our lean support team, which reduces their workload significantly even though we have roughly 20% more employees—all made possible with Chrome Enterprise.
Being free of slow, high-maintenance technology doesn’t just make the IT department happy—people are actually changing how they work. They no longer send files to each other by email or struggle to keep track of versions; they store everything in Google Drive and work together in Google Docs on a single document at the same time. And instead of traveling to other offices, connecting with each other in video conferences on Hangouts Meet has become a completely natural way to do business.
With Chromebooks and G Suite, we’re ready for anything: more new markets, more employees, and more-flexible ways to work together and shake up the staffing industry.
Google Introduces BigQuery Connector for SAP to Power Customers’ Data Analytics Strategy
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Google Cloud has a genuine passion for solving technology problems that make a difference for our customers. With the release of our BigQuery Connector for SAP, we’re taking a another big step towards solving a major challenge for SAP customers with a quick, easy, and inexpensive way to integrate SAP data with BigQuery, our serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective multi cloud data warehouse designed for business agility.
Solving for simplified data integration
Like most businesses today, SAP customers are eager to unlock the immediate insights and opportunities within their ever-growing stores of business data. However, many are discovering just how hard it can be to take the first step in any modern, cloud-enabled data analytics strategy: combining SAP data with other cloud-native, and enterprise data sets in real-time and at scale. According to a 2020 SAPInsider study, more than half of SAP customers surveyed said data integration was their top analytics pain point. These companies urgently need a rapid, sustainable, cost-effective and scalable way to integrate SAP data with modern cloud data analytics solutions.
The BigQuery Connector for SAP gives our customers a solution: a fast, simple, cost-effective and massively scalable way to make SAP data fully accessible within BigQuery by leveraging customers’ existing SAP Landscape Transformation Replication Server (SLT) tooling and skill sets. It’s the first SAP SLT direct near real-time connector for BigQuery without the need to set up additional infrastructure or third-party middleware, and can be deployed using a variety of embedded or stand-alone deployment options. In fact, most customers can install the BigQuery Connector for SAP in less than an hour—a remarkably easy way to start working with our industry-leading analytics solution that delivers proven and quantifiable business advantages for customers. Additionally, the BigQuery Connector for SAP is not restricted to customers who have deployed their SAP applications on Google Cloud. Customer’s who are running their SAP applications on-premise, or on any cloud, can also deploy and realize the analytical benefits of the solution.
Designing a solution with customer requirements and investments in mind
When the Google Cloud team started work on an analytics data integration tool for our SAP customers, we began with a set of requirements designed to root out the usual sources of cost and complexity. These included:
- The need for real-time performance with deltas replicated in milliseconds
- The ability to integrate data from almost any SAP Netweaver based application running today, regardless of its deployment location (on premises, any cloud, Google Cloud)
- Automatic BigQuery data type mapping with minimal transformation required
- Generation of target tables in BigQuery directly from source, if required
- Application layer integration that avoids the issues of direct database access
- Leveraging customers’ existing SAP skillsets, change data capture, and infrastructure
An important step towards meeting these requirements came when Alphabet, Google’s parent company, decided to leverage SAP SLT as a foundation for developing direct data replication between SAP and BigQuery for its internal corporate landscape. SLT as part of SAP’s strategic Business Technology Platform, supports real-time replication of data from SAP or third-party systems to SAP HANA, however, one of its limitations was direct integration with targets like BigQuery.
SAP SLT was a logical foundation for developing the connector for several reasons:
- It’s widely adopted among SAP customers who likely already leverage SLT for SAP analytics data integration
- It works with almost every non-SaaS SAP application environment running today
- It supports real-time replication performance at massive scale
It was an obvious choice for the Alphabet engineering team who saw immediate value from integrating SAP with BigQuery.
“The BigQuery Connector for SAP has enabled fast, low latency data replication for billions of records from 500+ tables of our most critical financial and supply chain data. Now in one cost-effective BigQuery data lake, this ERP data can be combined with other data sources for previously impossible real-time analytics and ML use cases. This allows us to drive much deeper strategic insights that support business and operational excellence, management and P&L reporting and more.”—Anil Nagalla, Sr. Engineering Director, Financial Systems, Google
SAP data integration with BigQuery enables new value
By leveraging SAP SLT, the BigQuery Connector for SAP can integrate real-time data streams from any SAP system—while also taking advantage of customers’ existing SAP investments and skillsets.
At the same time, the BigQuery Connector for SAP does a lot of heavy lifting on its own. For example, it automatically handles the complex, multi-step process of transforming SAP data types for use in BigQuery—mapping data-type transitions between the SAP and BigQuery environments, creating a target table schema on BigQuery for the transformed data types, building the target BigQuery table, and even adapting as new data types appear in your SAP environment.
For teams that want to fine-tune the BigQuery Connector for SAP’s automated recommendations, the connector supports additional levels of customization and choice. But if you simply want to get the job done and give your data analytics team greater support for their high-value work, then you’ll love just how quickly and easily the BigQuery Connector for SAP turns the complicated work of data integration and performance to process large volumes of data into a done deal. By integrating enterprise data sets in real time, customers can drive differentiated value and unlock new insights and actions that drive a competitive advantage.
The BigQuery Connector for SAP really shines as an enabling tool that transports and transforms your SAP data to power analytics solutions enabled by accelerators like the Google Cloud Cortex Framework: a comprehensive set of reference architectures, deployment accelerators, and integration services designed to give SAP customers a fast and seamless path to value with their data analytics investments. Simply put, the more SAP data you make available within Google Cloud, the easier it is to get meaningful—and often game-changing—insights from these solutions.
Learn more about the BigQuery Connector for SAP
Ready to get started with your own SAP data analytics strategy on Google Cloud? Install the Google Cloud BigQuery Connector for SAP, and discover a faster, simpler, more sustainable way to power your company’s data analytics strategy.
Why Indian Enterprises Need to Embrace The Cloud-First Imperative to Accelerate Digital Transformation
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Digital transformation is rewriting the rules of business both in India and worldwide. Digital customer experiences deliver easy, effective, and emotional touchpoints that focus operations on what the customers value. Around half of Indian decision makers prioritize the improvement of CX and the simplification of operations, as top priorities in their business agenda, according to a Forrester Consulting study of 360 business and technology decision makers of Indian enterprises.
According to the study, forward-thinking enterprises are increasingly turning to cloud to support their business as they attempt to keep pace with evolving customer needs. As a result, cloud has become a strategic priority, and ensuring its support in the marketplace will only enable digital business and accelerate innovation.
The study reveals that:
- Public cloud is a key enabler for the transformation of digital business.
- Security, inconsistent monitoring tools, and legacy applications are top barriers to public cloud expansion.
- Enterprises are expanding their adoption of the public cloud and want to gain a competitive edge.
Download this study to understand why more and more organizations are moving applications to the cloud in order to take advantage of scalability, lower capital costs, ease of operations, and the resilience offered by the public cloud.
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