PITTSBURGH and SUNNYVALE, Calif., Dec. 17, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — In its efforts to reinvent the health care experience and enrich the relationship between people and their clinicians, Highmark Health and Google Cloud today announced a six-year strategic partnership to build and maintain the innovation engine behind Highmark’s Living Health model.

The Living Health model is designed to eliminate the fragmentation in health care by re-engineering the healthcare delivery model with a more coordinated, personalized, technology-enabled experience. In addition to offering seamless, simpler and smarter interactions with patients, the Living Health model is designed to free clinicians from time-consuming administrative tasks while providing them with timely data and actionable information about each patient. Living Health is not just focused on improving the patient-clinician relationship, it is about changing the way health care delivery operates.

The agreement includes development of the Living Health Dynamic Platform, which will be designed to help overcome the complexities and fragmentation within the health care industry. Highmark Health will lead the collaboration to build its Living Health Dynamic Platform on Google Cloud; key elements of the agreement include:

• The construction of a highly secure and scalable platform built on Google Cloud;
• The application of Google Cloud’s advanced analytic and artificial intelligence capabilities to supercharge Highmark Health’s existing clinical and technology capabilities;
• The engagement of a highly-skilled professional services team that will collaborate to drive rapid innovation;
• The use of Google Cloud’s healthcare specific solutions, including the Google Cloud Healthcare API, to enable rapid innovation, interoperability, and a seamless Living Health experience.

“Highmark Health is on a mission to truly transform health care,” commented Karen Hanlon, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Highmark Health. “Instead of asking people to figure out the health system, or multiple systems, we have asked how the entire health experience should be re-engineered with them at the center. In order to deliver on the promise of Living Health, we had to change our organization by breaking down old paradigms and barriers, leveraging resources across our enterprise and bringing a differentiated approach to health care, which includes the development of a powerful technology platform to turbo-charge the model.”

The Living Health Dynamic Platform will power Highmark Health’s vision for a remarkable health experience by moving care and disease management of clinical conditions beyond traditional care settings through an engaged digital experience. By providing the insights needed to enable timely interventions, people will be empowered to proactively manage their health. For example, specific outcomes could include proactive intervention based on timely and individual patient data; digital disease management; easily accessible, personalized health plans; and centralized scheduling and management of care teams.

“The Living Health model is about improving each person’s health and quality of life, every day,” commented Dr. Tony Farah, executive vice president and chief medical and clinical transformation officer of Highmark Health. “The traditional health care system is too fragmented and for the most part reactive. The Living Health model takes the information and preferences that a person provides us, applies the analytics developed with Google Cloud, and creates a proactive, dynamic and readily accessible health plan and support team that fits an individual’s unique needs.”

“This partnership represents a significant opportunity to improve health care experiences and outcomes for millions of people,” said Andrew Moore, VP of Industry Solutions, Google Cloud. “The combination of Highmark Health’s deep understanding of patient behavior and clinical best practices, with Google Cloud’s technology capabilities, including artificial Intelligence and machine learning expertise, will accelerate access to the most cutting-edge tools for people to improve their health. We’re excited to help bring Highmark Health’s Living Health vision to life.”

“After rigorous evaluation and discussions with several leading technology companies, Google Cloud emerged as the most innovative and dynamic collaborator in terms of talent, technology, and resources,” continued Hanlon. “They share our sense of urgency and purpose in reinventing the health experience. Separately, our companies are already disrupting the traditional health care industry, but when you combine Highmark Health’s long history as an industry leader with Google Cloud’s technology and health expertise, the result is a collaboration that will give individuals and clinicians the technology platform and solutions that remove frustration and obstacles and make a remarkable health experience not only possible, but expected.”

Built on top of Google Cloud’s secure, reliable infrastructure, privacy and security will be a guiding principle of the Living Health Dynamic Platform. Highmark Health will control access and use of its patient data using rigorous long-standing organizational privacy controls and governance, which will be enhanced through the creation of a joint Highmark Health-Google Cloud Data Ethics and Privacy Review Board to ensure that uses of data are consistent with prescribed ethical principles, guidance, and customer expectations of privacy.

Approximately 125 new jobs are being created at Highmark Health to support development of the Living Health Dynamic Platform, specifically in the areas of application development, cloud-based computing architectures, analytics and user experience design.  

To learn more about Living Health, visit living.health.

To access multimedia tools, click here.

About Highmark Health
Highmark Health, a Pittsburgh, PA-based enterprise that employs more than 35,000 people who serve millions of Americans across the country, is the parent company of Highmark Inc., Allegheny Health Network, and HM Health Solutions.  Highmark Inc. and its subsidiaries and affiliates provide health insurance to more than 5.6 million members in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Delaware as well as dental insurance, and related health products through a national network of diversified businesses. Allegheny Health Network is an integrated delivery network comprised of thirteen hospitals, more than 2,500 affiliated physicians, ambulatory surgery centers, an employed physician organization, home and community-based health services, a research institute, a group purchasing organization, and health and wellness pavilions in western Pennsylvania. HM Health Solutions is focused on meeting the information technology platform and other business needs of the Highmark Health enterprise as well as unaffiliated health insurance plans by providing proven business processes, expert knowledge, and integrated cloud-based platforms. To learn more, visit www.highmarkhealth.org.

About Google Cloud
Google Cloud provides organizations with leading infrastructure, platform capabilities and industry solutions. We deliver enterprise-grade cloud solutions that leverage Google’s cutting-edge technology to help companies operate more efficiently and adapt to changing needs, giving customers a foundation for the future. Customers in more than 150 countries turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to solve their most critical business problems.

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SOURCE Highmark Health