Mayo Clinic Studies Google AI Health Records Tool

Mayo Clinic is examining a Google Cloud product that uses artificial intelligence to monitor and analyze language-based information in patients’ electronic health records.

As The Wall Street Journal reported Friday (March 25), Google, like many tech companies, has invested heavily in the fledgling technology, which is known as natural language processing and has made big advances over the past few years.

Vish Anantraman, chief technology officer of Mayo Clinic, told the Journal Google’s Healthcare Natural Language API could give clinicians an easier time when searching and accessing payment data, although he said the clinic’s research is still in its early stages.

Google announced earlier this month it was expanding its partnership with EHR platform MEDITECH to pilot Google natural language processing (NLP) technology to gain a better understanding of patient data.

See also: New Google Health Pact Taps Natural Language Processing as EHR Advances Connected Care

Roughly 80% of electronic patient data — including doctor’s notes and transcribed reports — is unstructured, Anatraman said. With natural language processing, hospitals can turn data that isn’t placed into discrete fields into structured data, giving clinicians an easier time searching and analyzing it.

When patient data is structured, hospitals will be able to match ideal patients to clinical trials and run prediction tools that can determine if patients are at risk for certain illnesses. This type of work was already possible, but required much more human involvement, said Anantraman.

“We just have a lot of data that is not accessible and locked down because they’re in an unstructured format,” Anantraman said.

As for the study as a whole: “I think the results are very promising. I would refrain from saying it’s spectacular,” the doctor said.

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News of the Mayo Clinic study comes just one day after Google said it was rolling out a scheduling feature as part of its search engine that shows healthcare providers’ availability to allow for simpler appointment booking.

“It can be a lot of friction when you’re making a doctor’s appointment. In the U.S. the average wait time for a primary care appointment can be 20 days or more,” said Hema Budaraju, Google’s senior director of product, health and search social impact. “It shouldn’t be this hard to get access to care.”