Google has announced the Google Cloud Healthcare Interoperability Readiness Program to help healthcare organizations understand their current interoperability maturity levels and map out a stepwise journey to enable interoperability.

The program is also aimed at navigating changes and increase healthcare organizations’ readiness for the new Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) rules.

Reflecting on the lessons of COVID-19, the program aims to help free up patient data and make it more accessible across the continuum of care, as well as set up organizations for long-term success with more modern, API-first architectures.

This program provides a set of services for interoperability, including HealthAPIx Accelerator, Apigee API Management and Google Cloud Healthcare API.

Apigee API Management enables a security and governance layer to deliver, manage, secure and scale APIs; consume and publish FHIR-ready APIs for partners and developers; build robust API analytics, and accelerate rollout of digital solutions.

Google Cloud Healthcare API enables secure methods for ingesting, transforming, harmonizing, and storing your data in the latest FHIR formats, as well as HL7v2 and DICOM.

Interoperability toolkit includes solution architectures, implementation guides, sandboxes and other resources to help accelerate interoperability adoption and streamline compliance with standards such as FHIR R4.

Google has worked closely with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and collaborated across the tech industry to support open standards to electronically exchange healthcare information and build an ecosystem that supports data privacy, security, compliance, and API management.