US-based healthcare company DaVita has partnered with Google Cloud to develop a system to improve kidney care.

The companies have introduced Center Without Walls (CWOW), a custom clinical operating system that will be used in treating more than 200,000 DaVita patients.

Built on Google Cloud infrastructure, the system employs artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics solutions devised jointly by the two organisations.

CWOW is now operational across DaVita's dialysis centres in the US, replacing their decentralised clinical documentation system with a unified platform.

DaVita medical affairs vice-president Dr Mark Kaplan said: “CWOW gives our caregivers access to the right data at the right time, so we can improve workflows and help our team spend more time with patients and less time interacting with a computer.

“CWOW is custom-built for kidney care, and the Google Cloud infrastructure allows us to connect with our physician and hospital partners to establish a consistent flow of information from day one of a patient's kidney care journey.”

The CWOW platform uses data from more than 30 million annual dialysis treatments to generate insights with the aim of improving clinical outcomes.

It is intended to enhance patient care and lower costs by enabling data sharing and increasing collaboration among physicians, hospitals and internal care teams.

In developing CWOW, DaVita used Google Cloud's Cloud Spanner, BigQuery and Vertex AI for database management, analytics, AI and machine learning.

DaVita chief information officer Alan Cullop said: “Our vision for CWOW required a flexible collaborator that would be willing to iterate as we worked to address the unique needs of DaVita and kidney care.

“From early-stage architecture and infrastructure conversations, to AI, analytics and IT security, Google has added significant value every step of the way, and we look forward to the next stage of innovation as we continue to enhance the CWOW platform.”