US non-profit healthcare company Highmark Health has partnered with Epic and Google Cloud to enhance coordination between payers and providers and personalise consumer experience in healthcare.  

The partnership leverages Epic's Payer Platform to drive automation and facilitate better collaboration, decision-making, and care while reducing the burden on both payers and providers. 

Epic's Payer Platform, when connected to Google Cloud, will offer insights to inform consumers about their care journeys.  

The collaboration will leverage Google Cloud's data analytics technologies, such as BigQuery and Healthcare Data Engine, to deliver insights for provider partner organisations that are using Epic, Highmark health plan staff, and Highmark members. 

These insights will be delivered via integrated digital channels, such as the My Highmark member portal. 

Clinicians will receive payer-derived insights, including condition, history of in- and out-of-network visits, health plan benefits, and insurance claims, directly within their existing workflows on Epic, providing a comprehensive view of a patient's health. 

This insight can help avoid surprise costs for patients and expedite service authorisations. 

Highmark can also leverage health plan-calculated care gap statuses to improve population health performance and understand outcomes. 

In addition, the partnership will allow health systems to automate the processes of alerting health plans about patients' encounters, which is otherwise time-consuming work involving phone calls or faxes.  

Highmark's collaboration with Epic and Google Cloud is significant, with more than half of its seven million members currently attributed to an Epic provider.  

The company anticipates this initiative to result in the automatic closure of 2.5 care gaps per member, potentially increasing the number of care gaps closed by up to 300%. 

Allegheny Health Network, Highmark Health's 14-hospital provider system, estimates an annual saving of $2.7m from this shared claims data, which will be reinvested into clinical care and patient experience.  

Highmark Health is also deploying a suite of digital tools for provider partners, including a new provider resource centre and Availity-powered portal. 

Highmark Health executive vice-president, chief medical and clinical transformation officer Tony Farah said: “Epic's Payer Platform is a powerful resource that enables payers and providers to work more effectively together. Pairing that resource with Google Cloud's technology gives Highmark Health the ability to change the paradigm.”