Former Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove, MD, serves as an adviser for Google Healthcare & Life Sciences, and he's helping the company figure out how to break into the healthcare industry, according to CNBC.
During the Rock Health Summit in San Francisco, Dr. Cosgrove said Google shouldn't try to win cloud contracts from large hospital systems. He said most large health systems won't move their entire infrastructures to a cloud system hosted by Google, Microsoft or Amazon because they've already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on IT systems from Epic, Cerner and other companies.
Dr. Cosgrove said instead of attempting to win cloud contracts from large health systems, Google needs to figure out what types of apps can be added on top of systems from Epic, Cerner and others.
For example, he thinks the next "killer application" in healthcare will be a voice application that leverages machine learning and natural language processing to transcribe physicians' medical notes, according to CNBC.
In addition to voice technology, Dr. Cosgrove said hospitals and health systems want to improve efficiency and cut costs, and many are looking to improve the process of getting patients in for appointments and sending out billing statements.
"You should be able to automate that somehow," he said. "The getting in to see a caregiver and getting a bill out are two of the screaming needs that have to be addressed."
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