What You Should Know:
– Highmark Health signs six-year strategic partnership agreement with Google Cloud to transform the health experience for patients and caregivers through the development of Highmark Health’s new Living Health Model
– The Living Health model is designed to eliminate the fragmentation in health care by re-engineering the healthcare delivery model with a more coordinated, personalized, technology-enabled experience.
Highmark Health and Google Cloud today announced a six-year strategic partnership to build and maintain the innovation engine behind Highmark’s Living Health model. The agreement includes the development of the Living Health Dynamic Platform, which will be designed to help overcome the complexities and fragmentation within the healthcare industry.
Re-engineering The Healthcare Delivery Model
Highmark’s Living Health model is designed to eliminate the fragmentation in health care by re-engineering the healthcare delivery model with a more coordinated, personalized, technology-enabled experience. In addition to offering seamless, simpler, and smarter interactions with patients, the Living Health model is designed to free clinicians from time-consuming administrative tasks while providing them with timely data and actionable information about each patient. Living Health is not just focused on improving the patient-clinician relationship, it is about changing the way health care delivery operates.
“The Living Health model is about improving each person’s health and quality of life, every day,” commented Dr. Tony Farah, executive vice president and chief medical and clinical transformation officer of Highmark Health. “The traditional health care system is too fragmented and for the most part reactive. The Living Health model takes the information and preferences that a person provides us, applies the analytics developed with Google Cloud, and creates a proactive, dynamic, and readily accessible health plan and support team that fits an individual’s unique needs.”
Living Health Model Powered by Google Cloud
Highmark Health will lead the collaboration to build its Living Health Dynamic Platform on Google Cloud. Key elements of the agreement include:
– The construction of a highly secure and scalable platform built on Google Cloud
– The application of Google Cloud’s advanced analytic and artificial intelligence capabilities to supercharge Highmark Health’s existing clinical and technology capabilities
– The engagement of a highly skilled professional services team that will collaborate to drive rapid innovation
– The use of Google Cloud’s healthcare-specific solutions, including the Google Cloud Healthcare API, to enable rapid innovation, interoperability, and a seamless Living Health experience.
Highmark Health will control access and use of its patient data using rigorous long-standing organizational privacy controls and governance, which will be enhanced through the creation of a joint Highmark Health-Google Cloud Data Ethics and Privacy Review Board to ensure that uses of data are consistent with prescribed ethical principles, guidance, and customer expectations of privacy.
Why It Matters
The strategic partnership reflects Highmark Health’s vision for a remarkable health experience by moving care and disease management of clinical conditions beyond traditional care settings through an engaging digital experience. By providing the insights needed to enable timely interventions, people will be empowered to proactively manage their health. For example, specific outcomes could include proactive intervention based on timely and individual patient data; digital disease management; easily accessible, personalized health plans; and centralized scheduling and management of care teams.
Economic Impact of Partnership
Approximately 125 new jobs are being created at Highmark Health to support the development of the Living Health Dynamic Platform, specifically in the areas of application development, cloud-based computing architectures, analytics, and user experience design.
