Google has announced early access to its Cloud Healthcare API which provides access to a solution for ingesting and managing key healthcare data types such as DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine), FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), and HL7 v2 (Health Level Seven International). The API also allows users to make that healthcare data available in order to apply machine learning and enable analytics in the cloud. The Google Cloud Healthcare API is only available to a select group of early access participants. Those interested in early access use of the API can submit a request to be notified when Google is on-boarding more API users.

The company is already working with a select group of partners and customers to help address some of the challenges when it comes to interoperability and data accessibility in the healthcare industry. One of the organizations working with Google as part of the Cloud Healthcare API early access launch is the Stanford School of Medicine.

"Open standards are critical to healthcare interoperability as well as for enabling biomedical research," said Somalee Datta, Ph.D., Stanford School of Medicine Director of Research IT, in a prepared statement. "We have been using the Google Cloud Genomics API for a long time and are very excited to see Google Cloud expanding its offerings to include the new Cloud Healthcare API. The ability to combine interoperability with Google Cloud's scalable analytics will have a transformative impact on our research community."

Google plans on rolling out the Cloud Healthcare API to more users over the next year.