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Last week, Google announced that its Cloud Healthcare API is now available in beta. The API acts as a bridge between on-site healthcare systems and applications that are hosted on Google Cloud. This API is HIPAA compliant, ecosystem-ready and developer-friendly.

The aim of the team at Google is to give hospitals and other healthcare facilities more analytical power with the help of Cloud Healthcare API.

The official post reads, “From the beginning, our primary goal with Cloud Healthcare API has been to advance data interoperability by breaking down the data silos that exist within care systems. The API enables healthcare organizations to ingest and manage key data and better understand that data through the application of analytics and machine learning in real time, at scale.”

This API offers a managed solution for storing and accessing healthcare data in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). With the help of this API, users can now explore new capabilities for data analysis, machine learning, and application development for healthcare solutions. The  Cloud Healthcare API also simplifies app development and device integration to speed up the process.

This API also supports standards-based data formats and protocols of existing healthcare tech. For instance, it will allow healthcare organizations to stream data processing with Cloud Dataflow, analyze data at scale with BigQuery, and tap into machine learning with the Cloud Machine Learning Engine.

Features of Cloud Healthcare API

Compliant and certified

This API is HIPAA compliant and HITRUST CSF certified. Google is also planning ISO 27001, ISO 27017, and ISO 27018 certifications for Cloud Healthcare API.

Explore your data

This API allows users to explore their healthcare data by incorporating advanced analytics and machine learning solutions such as BigQuery, Cloud AutoML, and Cloud ML Engine.

Managed scalability

Google’s Cloud Healthcare API provides web-native, serverless scaling which is optimized by Google’s infrastructure. Users can simply activate the API to send requests as the initial capacity configuration is not required.

Apigee Integration

This API integrates with Apigee, which is recognized by Gartner as a leader in full lifecycle API management, for delivering app and service ecosystems around user data.

Developer-friendly

This API organizes users’ healthcare information into datasets with one or more modality-specific stores per set where each store exposes both a REST and RPC interface.

Enhanced data liquidity

The API also supports bulk import and export of FHIR data and DICOM data, which accelerates delivery for applications with dependencies on existing datasets. It further provides a convenient API for moving data between projects.

The official post reads, “While our product and engineering teams are focused on building products to solve challenges across the healthcare and life sciences industries, our core mission embraces close collaboration with our partners and customers.”

Google will highlight what its partners, including the American Cancer Society, CareCloud, Kaiser Permanente, and iDigital are doing with the API at the ongoing Google Cloud Next.

To know more about this news, check out Google’s official announcement.

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