Google LLC and healthcare provider HCA Healthcare Inc. today announced a multiyear partnership for Google Cloud to build a health data analytics platform using patient medical records to improve operations while still protecting privacy and security.

HCA Healthcare uses information from more than 32 million annual encounters to develop insights to improve clinical care and support for its staff of 93,000 nurses and 47,000 physicians.

The company gathers the data from patient records, medical devices, tablets and every connected facet of its operation. It uses these insights to power its toolset of algorithm-informed decision support for clinical practices to reduce infections and improve care.

Through this partnership with Google Cloud, HCA expects to continue to develop and advance its algorithmic decision-making capabilities and further improve the quality of care for patients.

“Next-generation care demands data science-informed decision support so we can more sharply focus on safe, efficient and effective patient care,” said Sam Hazen, chief executive officer of HCA Healthcare.

According to HCA Healthcare, the company has deployed more than 90,000 mobile devices across its campuses and hospitals. These run tools created by the company’s PatientKeeper and Mobile Heartbeat teams.

Google Cloud will become central to empowering doctors, nurses and other staff by addressing the inflow of data and providing infrastructure for the analysis of the data and the dashboards that display the alerts on mobile devices.

For example, single patients rarely have a single point of contact even at a hospital or a doctor’s office. They see multiple specialists, go to labs, have blood drawn, require X-rays and produce records off campus that must be uploaded to HCA’s cloud.

Doctors themselves are supported by an entire array of healthcare professionals who work together for patient care and support, and now that patient records are digitized, it’s becoming easier and faster than ever to get results back on labs or radiology. By getting this information gathered faster, in one place where doctors and staff can see it, doctors can respond faster to changes in a patient’s condition.

“The cloud can be an accelerant for innovation in health, particularly in driving data interoperability, which is critical in streamlining operations and providing a better quality of care to improve patient outcomes,” said Thomas Kurian, chief executive officer of Google Cloud.

Most important, all the data that passes through Google Cloud will comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or HIPAA by using Google’s healthcare data capabilities including Cloud Healthcare API and BigQuery, a database capable of holding enormous amounts of data.

With this partnership, HCA and Google Cloud will also examine how to improve nonclinical hospital support through data and insights, such as supply chain, human resources and physical plant operations.

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