As increasing numbers of healthcare companies begin teaming up  with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), we’re celebrating a year in which CipherHealth jumped ahead of the pack by partnering with them early on, allowing us make a number of gains — more than doubling our patient outreach across the country, improved scalability of our applications to meet customers’ growing business needs and stronger security for our healthcare data. 

Since beginning our migration to GCP in 2021 and completing this process in early 2022 CipherHealth’s services are more performant and available than ever before. By moving away from traditional data centers to a healthcare data engine that is cloud-native, we can offer computing resources in different domestic regions, closer to our customers, resulting in quicker responsiveness. 

Thanks to GCP’s immense scalability, we’ve increased our HL7 throughput by over seven times, and can meet the expanding needs of health systems’ to process patient data much faster. 

For example, this improved reactivity has meant that we can actively engage a patient waiting for a follow-up appointment through the modality of their choice—voice, text, and conversational engagement tools—to book and confirm that appointment quickly and efficiently.  In another example, the time between a patient’s response to an outreach question or survey and the next audio or text messages they receive has decreased as a result of our move to the cloud. This allows for a more streamlined patient communication process, which leads to better health outcomes.

Moreover, by leveraging Google’s Natural Language Processing (NLP), we can transcribe and analyze patient-provider communications in real-time and perform sentiment analysis. To do this, we leverage the NLP and Machine Learning features from Google’s Vertex AI stack. 

According to the HIPAA Journal, between 2009 and 2021, 4,419 healthcare data breaches of 500 or more records were reported. Those breaches resulted in the loss, theft, exposure of over 314M healthcare records and sensitive patient data. Per the HIPAA journal, that equates to more than 94% of the 2021 population of the United States. 

We know that reversing these trends and safeguarding patient information is paramount to every healthcare organization. Using GCP has enabled us to get complete, end-to-end visibility into our infrastructure, applications, and traffic — something we couldn’t do without them. Security events can be holistically monitored and aggregated through GCP’s APIs, with a variety of third party SEIM (Security Information and Event Monitoring) tools such as Datadog and Palo Alto’s Prisma Cloud. With these supports in place, we have the ability to understand and digest information more quickly and take necessary actions to manage any issues appropriately. 

Overall, as a result of our partnership with GCP, we’re reaching more patients faster at any given time. And we’re happy to say that this increased availability, responsiveness and scalability has positioned us to exceed our service level agreements with our customers and improve health outcomes.