Highmark Partners with Google Cloud

Highmark Health https://www.highmarkhealth.org and Google Cloud https://cloud.google.com have announced a six year strategic partnership to build and maintain the innovation needed to develop Highmark’s Living Health https://living.health.org model. The model is designed to free clinicians from time-consuming administrative tasks while providing timely data and actionable information on each patient.

According to Dr. Tony Farah, EVP and Chief Medical and Clinical Transformation Officer at Highmark Health, “The traditional healthcare system is too fragmented and for the most part not always reactive. The Living Health Model takes the information and preferences that a person provides, and then applies the analytics developed with Google Cloud to create a proactive and readily accessible health plan to work with an individual’s unique needs.”

The agreement entails developing the Living Health Dynamic Platform which will be designed to help overcome the complexities and fragmentation within the healthcare industry. Highmark Health will lead the collaboration to build their Platform on Google Cloud.

Key elements of the agreement includes:

  • The application of Google Cloud’s advanced analytic and artificial intelligence to supercharge Highmark Health’s existing clinical and technology capabilities
  • Engaging a highly skilled professional services team to collaborate to drive rapid innovation
  • Using healthcare specific solutions, including the Google Cloud Healthcare API to enable innovation, and interoperability

 

The platform will enable people to proactively manage their health. For example, specific outcomes could include proactive intervention based on timely and individual patient data, digital disease management, be easily accessible, provide for personalized health plans, and provide centralized scheduling and management of care teams.

Highmark Health will control access and use of the patient’s data by using rigorous long standing organizational privacy controls and governance, which will be initiated via the creation of a joint Highmark Health-Google Cloud Data Ethics and Privacy Review Board to ensure that the use of the data is consistent with the customer’s expectations of privacy.

Approximately 125 new jobs are being created at Highmark Health to support the development of the Living Health Dynamic Platform. These jobs are specifically in the areas of application development, cloud-based computing architectures, analytics, and user experience design.