"I believe because of the gains in machine learning and data analysis, we have an opportunity to rethink some of those underlying assumptions." Because of the disjointed nature of the US healthcare system, Schmidt said that all medical data should be in one place that is easy for the doctor and patient to access.
As Schmidt outlines in the podcast episode, oftentimes when a patient has to have multiple tests done by different specialists, the medical information is not shared between their systems. This is just one example of the disconnected communications that Schmidt says could easily be fixed. "Right now, the majority of medical data is not even in the electronic health record system, it's in other systems that are sitting around in the hospital," Schmidt said. "But the work is underway and all EHR's will be cloud based quite soon."
"We'd have a much fuller picture of what's going on in a medical care setting and that would allow us to do better data analytics, better prediction and better healthcare," Schmidt said.