Highmark Teams With Google on AI-Powered Health Partnership

Highmark Health is working with Epic and Google Cloud to support payer-provider coordination.

“Epic’s Payer Platform improves collaboration between health insurers and health providers,” the companies said in a Monday (Feb. 26) news release. “Now, by connecting to Google Cloud, the insights shared with payers and providers can be used to inform consumers of the next best actions in their care journeys.”

The Epic platform allows for better payer-provider collaboration by driving automation, faster decision-making and better care — while lowering burdens and fragmentation, according to the release.

Google Cloud’s data analytics technologies, meanwhile, can help “facilitate insights shared with provider partner organizations” using Epic, Highmark health plan staff, and Highmark members through other integrated digital channels like the My Highmark member portal.

“Highmark Health’s use of Google Cloud will enable the organization to create an intelligence system equipped with AI to deliver valuable analytics and insights to healthcare workers, patients and members,” said Amy Waldron, director of healthcare and life sciences strategy and solutions at Google Cloud. “Highmark Health’s investment in cloud technology is delivering real-time value and simplifying communications; it’s redefining the provider and consumer experience.”

As PYMNTS wrote late last year, the intersection of AI and healthcare was one of 2023’s more exciting developments, with generative AI finding its way into areas ranging from medical imaging and pathology to electronic health record data entry.

PYMNTS Intelligence found that the generative AI healthcare market is expected to reach $22 billion by 2032, providing several possibilities for improved patient care, diagnosis accuracy and treatment outcomes.

Many of the latest AI innovations, including those aimed at helping doctors pull insights from healthcare data and allow users to find accurate clinical information more efficiently, are designed to help put clinician “pajama time” — the time spent on paperwork after shifts are ostensibly over — to rest.

“These problems typically cost providers significant amounts of time and resources, and a variety of point-solutions were brought to market this year to address them,” PYMNTS wrote in December.

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