3M Health Information Systems, a business of 3M, and Verily Life Sciences (formerly Google Life Sciences), an Alphabet company, today announced that they have entered into a strategic agreement to develop new population health measurement technology for managing clinical and financial performance. The joint technology platform will be designed to analyze quality performance data across healthcare delivery systems and patient populations, and deliver meaningful information that can be used to promote real and sustainable improvements in healthcare quality and cost.
“At 3M, we are constantly evaluating how health information technology can help improve the efficiency, quality and cost of delivering care,” said JaeLynn Williams, vice president and general manager, 3M Health Information Systems. “This collaboration reflects our commitment to continued innovation in health information systems that address real-world problems facing health care today, while protecting the privacy and security of health data.”
The joint technology platform will build on 3M’s extensive experience in health data coding and classification and its industry-leading risk stratification methodologies, which are used by federal agencies, hospital associations, and state Medicaid agencies for hospital quality reporting and as the basis for new outcomes-based payment models. Verily will apply its deep domain expertise in data analytics and the development of software tools and algorithms to help make this health data useful and actionable.
Together, 3M and Verily will work to transform population-level health data-sets into manageable and prioritized information so that participating hospitals, health systems, payers, regulators and strategic partners can evaluate performance, reduce waste and identify areas that impact efficiency, quality and cost.
“We have the data analytics and software to understand trends and make predictions across large quantities of data, and we see a clear opportunity to apply this approach to health data for insights that can impact care,” stated Tom Stanis, head of software and analytics at Verily. “Together, with 3M’s know-how and deep expertise in parsing and coding clinical data, we imagine a world where providers have precise information to guide focused improvement, and can consistently access objective, actionable feedback to make informed decisions.”
The 3M and Verily platform will be designed to include quality measures that assess complications, readmissions and mortality, and cost measures like length of stay and specific service line costs. It will evaluate multiple performance measures across departments, procedures and practitioners, including downstream providers such as specialists, home health and transitional care facilities.