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  Today in Health it, the story is Google's Care Studio. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current. And engaged VMware was the first sponsor of this week in Health it, and now they're the first sponsor of Today in Health.

it. They've been committed to our mission of providing relevant content to health professionals since the start. They recently completed an executive study with MIT on the top, healthcare Trends, shaping it, resilience, covering how the pandemic. Drove unique transformation in healthcare. This is just one of many great resources they have for healthcare professionals.

For this and several other content pieces, check out vmware.com/go/healthcare. Alright to today's story, this is an interview in Healthcare IT News, and the title of the story is Google Health ux, lead on designing EHRs that work for clinicians. All right, so an interview. What is Google up to? Here's some excerpts from the interview.

Given that existing health IT tools, especially electronic health records, notoriously are not very user-friendly. Many healthcare information technology vendors are spending time and resources designing it that makes clinicians happy. One such vendor is Google Health. Recently introduced Google Care Studio software designed to streamline healthcare information for clinicians.

It brings together information from different EHRs and lets doctors and nurses browse and search in one streamlined interface. Melissa Strader, UX manager at the company discusses keys for designing EHRs for clinicians, getting past tech fatigue, understanding clinician behavior and workflows and machine learning's role in EHR design.

I'm just gonna give you a couple little excerpts. I skipped some of the questions in here, but . First question, what are some keys for designing EHRs for clinicians given current tools are often not very user-friendly, and she goes on to say, in the last few decades, health IT solutions have done a great job in digitizing healthcare information and processes.

Today's EHRs are powerful tools that are built to address many needs, including supporting hospital administrators, IT teams, billing departments, and more. Missing from that list is this can make it challenging for clinicians to quickly find the information they need at the point of care. Doctors and nurses often have to navigate through multiple disconnected systems to get all the information they need to care for the patient.

My biggest takeaway when designing technology is to start with who's using it. In this case, clinicians and build to address their needs. Clinicians can be overwhelmed with too much information. So bringing meaning to that information is the key to making clinicians feel like their tools are truly designed for their needs.

Absolutely. She goes on. What we need to know about clinicians is that their daily activities and environment are complex and fluid, and therefore any tool . It needs to be sensitive to those variable workflows and constant task switching and fit into the way that they're working when applying this Approach to Care Studio, Google's solution for bringing health records together, we designed the product around a few key principles that put clinicians first.

Number one, we wanted to make the time spent between doctors and their patients more valuable, productive, and human. A lot of companies are trying to do that. Number two, we wanted to avoid the temptation to build something that was only incrementally better than what was available. Since we understood that clinicians not only had information overload, they had an overwhelming number of tools as well.

And third, we wanted to imagine with clinicians how to present information in a meaningful way. And this is one of the biggest challenges, right? It's getting all that information together. And normalizing that data and then presenting it back to the clinicians in a way that they can use it at the point of care to make it easy to, to create those screens.

This is why UX is so important. I. One way we hope to address tech fatigue and skepticism has been to build a tool that could demonstrate value immediately. Drawing on familiarity, setting expectations on workflow changes, and solving clinically important challenges can go a long way in providing value quickly.

Pretty much every clinician is familiar with Google search, so they built it around Google search. It makes perfect sense and they know how it works By designing our product interface around that familiar search bar. We could tell clinicians that this is something they already know how to use and it will just work and help you to find what you're looking for, which is what it does on the internet.

Alright, let's go down a little further. This is the last question. You've also said there's huge potential in using machine learning. To make day-to-day EHR work easier for clinicians. For instance, if a doctor is looking for a specific medication or procedure, wouldn't it be helpful if other information related to that was displayed as well?

How else can AI help? And here's her answer. Working more easily for clinicians is the key here. We all have products and services in our lives that just seem to work without needing to learn how to use them. While EHRs have come a long way in transforming how healthcare data is stored and presented, we've heard from clinicians that this magic of finding exactly what you're looking for is still missing.

Although AI and machine learning in healthcare often are associated with predictive analytics, this technology can also be helpful to helping clinicians search for information across a medical record. This is difficult to do with health information since different systems use different codes and units of measurement.

We've used machine learning to connect medically related concepts. Machine learning can draw connections between things like medications and conditions so that clinicians can more easily see all the information needed to understand a patient. Another example is using machine learning to provide one line summaries of patients with critical information extracted from the node section so that providers can quickly get up to speed on new patients.

These examples are rooted in designing for the doctor. While there are endless ways AI may be able to transform healthcare in design for clinical tools, it's important to think first about how it can make a clinician's day easier. All right. My So what on this is, this is one example of what a lot of companies are really going after, and that is.

Reducing the clinician burden, reducing technology fatigue, reducing work fatigue, data entry fatigue, unlocking the data, unlocking the information that is in the EHR, making it more relevant during the face-to-face visit with the, uh, clinician and the patient. And so Google is one of those players who's essentially making an interface that sits above the EHR.

So imagine you're a clinically integrated network and you have . 20 EHRs. This is a way to pull all that information in and still see it. It's almost like a viewer into an HIE, if you will. They build both functionality into it. It can sit above the EHR layer and pull the data. From multiple EHRs. I, I like the approach.

I have to admit that we were building something just like this back in 20, uh, 14 and 15. It is really hard to do, and if anyone's gonna do it, Google's gonna do it. If I were a CIO today, I would be talking to Google, well, I'd be talking to Google, apple, Amazon, Microsoft. I'd be talking to all of 'em.

There's no reason not to be, to be on the inside, understanding what they're doing, what they're bringing to the table, maybe do a pilot, see if it works, get your clinicians involved, see what they think about it. They may not want another tool, and I get that, but there are a lot of use cases, especially a clinically integrated network with multiple EHRs where this might just do the tricks.

So something I would keep an eye on. That is all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Apple, Google Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, you get the picture. We are everywhere.

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