Highmark Health engages Verily to reinvent the healthcare experience for Highmark Health customers and clinicians

PITTSBURGH and SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., March 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Highmark Health, a national blended health organization, today announced a strategic collaboration with Verily that will complement and build upon the partnership it recently announced with Google Cloud – sister company to Verily within Alphabet –  to develop its Living Health model. 

The Living Health model is designed to eliminate the fragmentation in health care, re-engineering the health care delivery model to provide a seamless, simpler and smarter customer experience. In addition to offering improved interactions with patients, the Living Health model will free clinicians from time-consuming administrative tasks while providing them with timely personalized data, real-time remote monitoring, and actionable information about each patient.

The six-year collaboration agreement centers on Verily providing  digitally-enabled care solutions to manage chronic conditions, with potential initial areas of focus to include congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), as well as a clinical insights platform that will allow Highmark Health to use data to guide patients through personalized pathways for care. These solutions will be part of Highmark Health’s Living Health model for patients and clinicians.

Leveraging Verily’s advanced analytics and artificial intelligence and Highmark Health’s clinical insights and expertise — gathered through its unique relationship and experience with patients as both insurer and provider – these solutions will be refined through a robust, nimble, test-and-learn environment to build evidence and clinical validation for condition-specific solutions. Verily, and its subsidiary Onduo, will simultaneously collaborate with Google Cloud to integrate these chronic disease solutions into Highmark’s Living Health model and the Living Health Dynamic Platform currently being built on Google Cloud.

Ultimately, the Living Health Dynamic Platform will enable clinicians to determine the appropriate next set of personalized actions for each patient, taking into account comorbidities, patient interests and goals, and more. These chronic disease solutions will also extend care outside of the traditional clinical setting — integrating virtual care, digitally enabled devices and coaching to support patients in between visits.

“Highmark Health and Verily have a shared mission to truly transform health care,” commented Karen Hanlon, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Highmark Health. “A key component of that transformation is our Living Health model. We believe the collaboration with Verily and Google Cloud is the ideal trifecta of expertise that will enable us to create and deliver a remarkable health experience for patients through a holistic, digitally-enabled, personalized set of solutions, while also enabling clinicians, supported by a person’s health team, to focus on the specific needs of each patient and intervene at the right time to proactively prevent disease or its progression”.

“This partnership is truly symbiotic,” added Dr. Tony Farah, executive vice president and chief medical and clinical transformation officer of Highmark Health. “Together, we will drive transformational and more sustainable change, and we will do it faster than we could working separately.  Through the significant work we have already done, Highmark Health has clearly demonstrated that we can improve people’s health by moving care upstream and that success comes from engaging clinicians in the design, test-and-learn and pilot phases of any new care delivery model. Together with Google Cloud and Verily’s consumer experience and technology, we will deliver the scale needed to provide more people and their health teams access to the most cutting edge digital and analytic tools to improve their health using a simplified and seamless approach.”

“We’re thrilled to be working with Highmark across Verily’s health platforms to serve the needs of both patients and clinicians,” said Vivian Lee, MD, President of Health Platforms at Verily and Chair of the Board of Onduo. “As a leading integrated delivery network with a large population, Highmark is poised to show how a technology-enabled environment can help their members achieve better health in a personalized and accessible way that also lowers the costs of care. By providing actionable insights for patients and clinicians, the tools we build together will make the experience of health care more engaging and effective for all.”

“Highmark has taken a long-term view in putting the infrastructure, programs and technology needed in place to complement high-quality in-person healthcare experiences,” said Vindell Washington, MD, Chief Executive Officer, Onduo. “Highmark is creating the type of healthcare experience that we all want as consumers and that we’ve learned at Onduo can drive meaningful clinical outcomes.”

Built on top of Google Cloud’s secure, reliable infrastructure, privacy and security are a guiding principle of the Living Health model. Highmark Health controls access and use of its patient data using rigorous, long-standing organizational privacy controls and governance. Verily will join the existing Highmark Health-Google Cloud Governance structure, which includes Verily participants in each of the Committees: Executive Committee, Joint Steering Committee, and Data Ethics and Review Board (DEAR), which will ensure that uses of data are consistent with prescribed ethical principles, guidance, and customer expectations.

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

To access multimedia tools, visit https://f.io/CYWaXbsh

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., a hospital system, and other businesses. 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. Highmark Health’s other subsidiaries include an integrated delivery network comprised of eight 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; and an information technology business 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 Verily
Launched in 2015, Verily is a subsidiary of Alphabet focused on life sciences and healthcare. Verily’s mission is to make the world’s health data useful so that people enjoy healthier lives. Verily develops tools and devices to collect, organize and activate health data, and creates interventions to prevent and manage disease. Verily partners with leading life sciences, medical device, and government organizations, using deep hardware, software, scientific, and healthcare expertise to enable faster development, meaningful advances, and deployment at scale. For more information, please visit www.verily.com.

About Onduo
Onduo, a Verily subsidiary, launched initially with the type 2 diabetes population and delivers lifestyle and clinical interventions that leverage deep analytics, connected smart devices, innovative software, and access to specialty care. For more information, please visit https://onduo.com/.

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 and Verily