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The Future of Interoperability: Healthcare Interoperability 2.0

Episode Notes

HealthIMPACT Live Presents: The Future of Interoperability: Healthcare Interoperability 2.0

Originally  Published: Nov 15, 2021

YouTube Video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAmxJnUrbPA

Hospitals have been focused on interoperability since the introduction of HL7. However, while technologies, requirements, and regulations have changed, many healthcare leaders persist in thinking of interoperability in an outdated way. The legacy definition of interoperability focuses on getting internal systems to share data well, but today’s interoperability is more than a 30-year improvement on connecting labs to an EHR, all exchanges which happened within the same organization. Interoperability 2.0 focuses on releasing and unlocking hospital and health system data to connect and share it with individuals, programs, and organizations outside of the boundary of your organization. What is possible when you extend the boundaries of interoperability?

 

Michael Ames, Sr. Director, Healthcare & Life Sciences, SADA

Amy Waldron, Director of Industry Strategy, Google Cloud Healthcare & Life Sciences

Episode Transcription

Michael Ames : Hey everyone, welcome to our session today we're really excited to be here to talk to you about healthcare interoperability 2.0. I'm Michael Ames, I'm senior director for healthcare and life sciences at SADA really pleased to have Amy Waldron with me who's global director of healthcare industry solutions with Google cloud. We're going to talk about quite a few things around healthcare interoperability and how we should be thinking about it for the future. Amy's going to have a piece of in the middle. I'll let her introduce herself a little bit more then.  

 

Okay, so let's talk about vision, a little bit one of the fun things about working with Google is being closely involved with people who have big ideas and big vision, all the time. Sometimes, I can tell you it'll sort of run away with them about five years ago, I was heading up a project to integrate a bunch of healthcare data for a university and a couple of hospital systems. We'd had some trouble getting launched on an on premises system, and we had this kind of new idea.That maybe we could take this to the cloud and get some advantages. And we started looking at Google cloud Google got excited about this because there wasn't a lot of healthcare work happening on the cloud in those days, and they came out to talk to us and to talk to us about vision and we sat down with some of their brilliant engineers who started pitching to us great ideas they're like.

 

Amy Waldron: Thanks Michael hi everyone i'm Amy Waldron on the global director of healthcare and life sciences industry solutions, with a focus on payers and providers spend most of my time working with payers and providers around the globe as they're working through individual use cases with the cloud but also creating their digital transformation strategies. So i'm going to share what we're seeing today and and clearly I think everyone really knows, in the past year we've had witness unprecedented change across the health ecosystem and really saw data some to life as we've tried to support our communities more now than ever data and technology have been tapped. Now analyzing complex healthcare data it's not new, however, the key here has been an acceleration, I only have the use to solve pressing issues, but also the acceptance of cloud. And this is just a few examples of where we work with organizations across the ecosystem to do some pretty remarkable things over the last year and a half.So at hca, and this was something that Michael asada and our team worked on, we worked with them on a data portal to help communities respond to code 19. And really The challenge here was we had to ingest data from thousands of sources in order to create real time analytics understanding the supply and demand and the needs of the Community say served. For the state of Missouri we partner with them to help them with their forecast demand and optic optimization of the supply chain for P P, obviously, in order to keep people in their organization or people in their in their area, safe and then with Harvard Global Health Institute collaborated with them around the curve and 19 forecasting models that so many of us have used.

 

And then, last but not least, we work with schrodinger to explore and model more compounds expediting the drug discovery timeline in order to save more time and more lives so really all of these projects centered around ingesting data from both internal organizations, as well as external sources.

 

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Amy Waldron: that's really the power of the interoperability capabilities that have come out today.

 

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Amy Waldron: Harmonizing them and being able to leverage Ai and ml to generate near real time analytics to solve big problems.

 

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Amy Waldron: The improvement of data interoperability solutions and the acceptance of cloud really positions us to offer a whole new level of value, not only for consumers, but for the clinicians and the communities at large.

 

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Amy Waldron: So this next slide is going to be this flashback I think to michael's this vision is too big, well, we really believe that.

 

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Amy Waldron: From where we've come from, we are emerging from the pandemic.

 

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Amy Waldron: With a perspective that the industry really can pivot and focus on using all of this data to support healthier lives and we can do that it's an end of one.

 

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Amy Waldron: we've been an industry in the past that's looked at segmentation based on geography or based on age, but given the data that we have today.

 

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Amy Waldron: we're seeing some amazing investments around the ecosystem, both from disruptors as well as legacy partners and looking at how are we investing in the patient and Member experience.

 

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Amy Waldron: Improving engagement.

 

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Amy Waldron: adding value to support wellness while better managing chronic conditions and enabling home health and more the end game is each individual person.

 

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Amy Waldron: Living the life that they want to live, and this may seem daunting to some of you, especially as we've spent a tremendous amount of time.

 

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Amy Waldron: Addressing the near term issues of coven The good thing here is that.

 

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Amy Waldron: The models are changing and a lot of partnerships across the ecosystem are taking place, that we can all benefit from, and so this requires interoperability and information flow.

 

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Amy Waldron: That works for consumers clinicians in our communities as a whole and the world is becoming much more digitally connected which you'll see on the next slide.

 

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Amy Waldron: So this is what we're looking at with regards to information flow and what's being created today we're already seeing the connected customer.

 

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Amy Waldron: But the reality is that we're going to have a whole lot more of them around the globe, with 43 billion by 2023 really enabling healthcare everywhere.

 

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Amy Waldron: And that data it's no surprise it's getting bigger healthcare generates 30% of the world's data and still remains the fastest growing industry for data.

 

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Amy Waldron: So there'll be no shortage there, the key is how do you turn that data into information and that's where we're looking at Ai lead innovations.

 

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Amy Waldron: The Ai health market will reach 6.6 billion this year and will be delivering real time insights for consumers and clinicians will feeding data powered innovation.

 

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Amy Waldron: The question we should all be asking ourselves is how do we make sure that this information is connected.

 

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Amy Waldron: As Mike Michael mentioned earlier, if you go to the right hand side of the slide you'll see personalized patient care.

 

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Amy Waldron: there's been tremendous investment across the ecosystem both across payers and providers, especially on creating longitudinal patient records.

 

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Amy Waldron: Being able to become much more predictive and personalized and patient centric here, and this is where i've seen a lot of collaboration between payers and providers, where the.

 

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Amy Waldron: The health plan space has really focused on teaming with healthcare providers on the analytics and generating analytics and programs to help look at a community and to help look at programs, such as chronic care management.

 

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Amy Waldron: and delivering that teaming to manage the risk of populations with you know the payer and the health plan.

 

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Amy Waldron: Collaboration and then last but not least, we have industry four point now smart manufacturing is happening everywhere it's on the backbone of cloud.

 

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Amy Waldron: This collaboration is now going to create over two times the value within the ecosystem, the imperative here is for the industry to turn this all of this data.

 

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Amy Waldron: into information and value so that the consumers can be supported on their health and wellness journey really flipping over.

 

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Amy Waldron: The way care is being delivered today to be more proactive and care anywhere versus waiting until someone is at an acute stage entering the hospital.

 

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Amy Waldron: So, if you look at the next slide this kind of shows how our individual consumers and patients and Members, depending on the role they're surrounded by data.

 

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Amy Waldron: And we have the opportunity, as an industry to think through not only what our organizations can develop, but also where we can partner, whether it's with is fees or other people in the ecosystem in order to provide.

 

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Amy Waldron: A improved experience, improving engagement, improving outcomes, creating that true customer centric model and workflow integration.

 

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Amy Waldron: workflow integration integrating into a customer or patient or members life.

 

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Amy Waldron: But also workflow integration with the clinicians and all the other caregivers in the Community it's possible and if you look at this slide here, you can see.

 

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Amy Waldron: You know, with information pulled together, you can predict and prevent diseases with personal health data, the integration of genomics demographics medical records.

 

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Amy Waldron: You can improve adherence and support recovery with remote monitoring and sensors you can help deliver better administrative efficiencies for hospital and health workers, improving scheduling.

 

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Amy Waldron: Claims records and care management support clinicians to optimize clinical workflows for treatments interventions.

 

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Amy Waldron: enable faster diagnosis and personalized care and also help detect a managed health conditions it's very powerful here.

 

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Amy Waldron: And with the cloud and with partnerships and interoperability, we really have the ability to secure the data to manage permissions and access control and provide a lot more value, while protecting their privacy.

 

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Amy Waldron: So, as we look at turning this into use cases again Michael talked about this big vision, sometimes looking too big, but the reality is there's a tremendous amount of use cases.

 

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Amy Waldron: That really will make faster sense with is proliferating data by using cloud technology and interoperability technology so population how means prioritizing patients and Members, based on their home health device readings today.

 

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Amy Waldron: payer provider collaboration that provides real time actionable insights directly into the emr workflow when needed.

 

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Amy Waldron: Health equity means screening opportunities, based on clinical data and social demographic factors and decentralized clinical trials, where you actually can identify a patient.

 

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Amy Waldron: fits into a pro am sorry trial when they're still in the doctor's office and, lastly, real world evidence means making sense of all the data, not just claims.

 

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Amy Waldron: So just to kind of map it out in the world of the ecosystem on the next slide all of this data that's getting created.

 

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Amy Waldron: Organizations need to reimagine how they can actually take these clinical workflows and close gaps, so the patient care continuum.

 

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Amy Waldron: This requires a secure scalable intelligent data foundation so data from one interaction can actually inform other interactions across the care continuum.

 

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Amy Waldron: With interoperability and an ml capabilities that are built for healthcare, we can do this, you start off with use cases and kind of that that big vision.

 

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Amy Waldron: And we can get there, so it's exciting to see how far we've come a Granite a bit pressure tested with coven, but we have come a long way.

 

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Amy Waldron: And in the last one or two years we now we're at a spot where the products and solutions and capabilities within the cloud really can provide the industry.

 

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Amy Waldron: With secure scalable solutions that will help take projects that used to take six months and 12 months and actually accelerate them into 698 week periods, which is really phenomenal.

 

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Amy Waldron: So with that said i'd like to turn it back to Michael to talk about how we make some of these game changers work.

 

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Michael Ames : Great Thank you very much amy, you know as you were talking you mentioned Ai a couple of times and I got thinking another another sort of insight into the Google brain that I can share a sort of an outsider who who's closely involved is.

 

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Michael Ames : Well, this probably isn't literally true it's a useful model to when you think about Google cloud to think that all they care about is is machine learning and artificial intelligence like at the end of the day.

 

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Michael Ames : it's google's life mission to to enable the rest of us with those tools, because of google's own success and their own you know 25 year history.

 

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Michael Ames : at delivering solutions based on those technologies and everything else that is done and all the capabilities that are out there sort of designed to help you get there, so I can talk a little bit from experience on how.

 

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Michael Ames : I stumbled a little bit on the right things that now inform my perspective on on interrupt two point o

 

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Michael Ames : going way back, I was just new out of college I got recruited to a little.com startup and we got like a foosball table and some awesome office space and we sat down to think of the quirkiest funniest name that we could that would get attention and help get us on the map.

 

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Michael Ames : A couple of founders brilliant guys unveiled to us this company is going to be called savvy Sherpa and and we all sort of kind of chuckled a little bit of that.

 

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Michael Ames : But they were like, no, no, you didn't understand we are guiding people through their data and we're doing it in a really intelligent ways savvy Sherpa.

 

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Michael Ames : is perfect now share you that not to advertise that company, but because it matters now, I left that company about four years later.

 

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Michael Ames : And and and took a took a winding interesting path through medical device and academic medical and other areas of our.

 

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Michael Ames : of our industry and ultimately found myself responsible, as I said at the beginning for this data warehousing project with a couple of hospital systems can we just get the data.

 

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Michael Ames : Out of epic up somewhere, we can write sequel queries against that, if we could do that that would be a big step forward, we did that.

 

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Michael Ames : We launched it on the cloud, we were able to meet those basic expectations, but what we didn't realize what I didn't see at the time was how important.

 

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Michael Ames : Some of these other interrupt two point O things were going to become in terms of being able to share and move data.

 

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Michael Ames : external to the system and secure and compliant ways until after having not even heard the name of that company.

 

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Michael Ames : For probably 10 years I was sitting in my office when the architect from from one of our partner hospital systems walked in and said yeah it's really great that we've got other data.

 

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Michael Ames : up there in the cloud, what we need you to do is create some secure environments up there, so that we can give access to it from my data scientists at savvy Sherpa.

 

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Michael Ames : And it knocked me on the floor, I said wait a second savvy Sherpa in minneapolis as though there could have been two of them in the world right.

 

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Michael Ames : There was only the one they'd come full circle to doing ml based analytics on health care data and this hospital system that we were partnering with was doing incredible innovation work there and what was enabling it.

 

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Michael Ames : But the fact that we had utilized forward thinking technologies to get the data into a place where they could safely securely share that data in an environment that would help them.

 

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Michael Ames : To scale and keep it secure and do all the things that they needed to do, while keeping the data safe so that informs my view as I talk about what we should be looking at.

 

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Michael Ames : In interrupt two point O for platform requirements one cloud based secure and fully managed that's not even like hot a new anymore that's table stakes.

 

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Michael Ames : If if you're trying to accomplish this by installing something in your organization behind your firewall you are just building your tech debt.

 

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Michael Ames : And that's going to undermine your goals for innovation.

 

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Michael Ames : Second i'd also say table stakes based on open standards if you are adopting an interoperability platform.

 

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Michael Ames : That requires you to adopt specific proprietary tools in order for any of it to work then you're going to be building interrupt for your interrupt platform now nothing is going to be plug and play.

 

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Michael Ames : But get as close as you can to make it easy to exchange data with your partners.

 

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Michael Ames : and others multilingual is really important there's a misconception out there that fire is rocking and rolling.

 

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Michael Ames : pretty soon will be out of hl seven this misconception is not on the part of healthcare providers is more on the part of is v's and others who want to consume this data.

 

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Michael Ames : friends, we are we love fire but we're a long way away from it being of the lingua franca Franco that's going to be hl seven V2 and especially for streaming data and real time data it's going to be till seven for a long time.

 

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Michael Ames : But you've got csv and die calm and CDA and and so many other things out then it's important that we speak all those languages finally.

 

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Michael Ames : You you will do work implementing a platform to make all this data interoperable and in the course of that you'll be doing things like harmonizing.

 

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Michael Ames : From a semantic perspective and other perspectives getting the data all nicely aligned and organized to walk away from that, from an analytics perspective, it is an unforgivable waste.

 

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Michael Ames : don't leave that data on the table and don't go building separate data flows for analytics when you have already done so much work preparing it for interoperability.

 

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Michael Ames : Okay, cement, I think we had a sneeze in there on to go on mute and that may or may not need an edit but i'm going to i'm going to repeat that last part don't leave the data on the table.

 

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Michael Ames : And don't go building separate data flows to enable interrupt and analytics.

 

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Michael Ames : you'll be repeating effort that you put a lot of work into the first time around this these requirements are met by a number of products and platforms that are out there on the market today.

 

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Michael Ames : i'm going to walk you through Google solution for it, not as a sales pitch, but just so that you can see that these things are real because, again, our thesis here is that the vision is not too big.

 

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Michael Ames : That you can accomplish this today with tools that are out there today high level overview of Google clouds healthcare data engine.

 

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Michael Ames : This is a turnkey solution that provides out of the box hipaa compliance security auditing logging.

 

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Michael Ames : ingest data in whatever sources and harmonize it to an open standards fire store that you access with the open standard.

 

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Michael Ames : Protocol and query with the open standard rest based web services as defined by the fire organization that data becomes available for interrupt interoperability.

 

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Michael Ames : Among and between an outside your organization to others under under Rules that you can configure and consider things like patient consent and other things.

 

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Michael Ames : And ultimately streams in real time out to an analytic database more technical view for for the nerds in the audience, who are most of you. On the left side we've got data coming in and a number of formats being processed on Google cloud and going out. To external systems for interrupt capabilities of your fire out to Google big query for scalable analytics and reporting and, finally, in the red box on the right to come full circle back to amy's comments on Ai. Once that data that you've invested in for interoperability purposes is there and big query can also flow into google's vertex Ai platform. Which is the world's leading platform for developing and production analyzing predictive models on any kind of data. So we're excited about this because we look at this and we see yeah all of these great things that we think we can do with interoperability 2.0 we have the technology now to enable and and we're excited to see where we, as an.

 

 

Amy Waldron: Industry.

 

 

Michael Ames : can take this, so I would like to thank amy for coming to to join on this presentation today thank all of you for your time and coming to attend will answer any questions that showed up in the chat here is contact information for each of us feel free to reach out directly and we'll address your questions there, we look forward to to working together to do some great things in a vision that is not at all too big.

 

 

Amy Waldron: yeah and one closing thought here as well, is that cove it has had a lot of people working tirelessly on their needs. Today, keep in mind a lot of things across the ecosystem have evolved when it comes to cloud computing a lot of great new solutions and capabilities, have been created, so you know, please what didn't exist, two years ago might exist today so be excited about the possibilities, the opportunities and the teeming throughout the ecosystem, to really make a difference.

 

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Michael Ames : Thanks Amy.