Healthcare interoperability platform Redox partners with Google Cloud

The integration is meant to make it easier to find, extract, and make healthcare data actionable

Thanks to the proliferation of technologies like wearables and electronic health records, there is more data flowing in healthcare than ever before, generating more than 19 terabytes of clinical data alone every year. In fact, almost a third of the world’s entire data volume is being generated by the healthcare industry.

Thanks to the Office of the National Coordinator's (ONC) Cures Act Final Rule, patients are finally supposed to have access to that data, while the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Interoperability and Patient Access Rule requires that health plans participating in federal exchanges share claims data with patients electronically. Unfortunately, the data is often siloed across multiple IT systems and organizations, making it difficult to find, extract, and turn it into something actionable.

In order to fix that issue, healthcare interoperability company Redox announced a partnership with Google Cloud this week, which it says will improve the flow and unification of data across health care systems.

As a part of the partnership, Redox will replicate its platform on Google Cloud, offering Google Cloud customers, including health plans, providers, life science, medical device companies, and digital health organizations, the ability to incorporate standards like HL7v2, C-CDA, X12, and DICOM, into FHIR.

The idea is to will make it faster and easier for those organizations to use Google Cloud's products, such as Healthcare API and Healthcare Data Engine.

Founded in 2014, Redox is an EHR integration and healthcare platform that accelerates the development and distribution of healthcare software solutions. The company is connected to more than 4,500 healthcare organizations, including payers, providers, and digital health companies, who can use it to connect to every electronic health record, including Epic, Allscripts, and Cerner. 

In a statement, Redox CEO Luke Bonney said that the combination of Redox and Google Cloud will allow providers and health plans to maximize the use of their legacy system data in a single cloud database, which will be up to 80%.

"Healthcare organizations are transforming using new applications and analytics tools driven by cloud technology. Redox was designed to support these new tools with enterprise-scale data exchange with hospitals, clinics, health plans, Healthcare Information Exchanges, networks and other sources that provide the foundation of healthcare data," he said. 

"When we first collaborated with Redox and saw how fast we could help a healthcare organization further accelerate data interoperability, we had an 'aha' moment," said Chris Sakalosky, vice president, Strategic Industries at Google Cloud, in a statement.

"With this partnership, we continue to help organizations across the healthcare spectrum tackle the most complex data harmonization challenges, unlocking insights and improving outcomes."