Google Cloud Introduces New Generative AI Solutions For Healthcare, Life Science Businesses

Google Cloud has announced new solutions to help healthcare and life sciences organisations enable interoperability, leverage data analytics and deploy generative artificial intelligence tools to improve patient outcomes.

Google Cloud's Vertex AI Search for Healthcare will help developers build better assistive technology for clinicians and health system workers to ease administrative burden. It will enable medically-tuned, gen AI searches on a range of data, including Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources data and clinical notes, the company said.

These search and question-answering capabilities will be integrated with Google Cloud’s large language models and data solutions for the healthcare industry in an attempt to make it easier for organisations to build the data analytics and AI solutions needed for advanced health systems.

According to research, healthcare administrative costs rose 30% in 2022 to reach $60 billion annually, physician burnout increased to 53% in 2022, and there is a shortage of more than 13 million nurses in the world. This presents a prospect for healthcare stakeholders to build gen AI solutions that can improve the efficiencies of healthcare workers and other employees.

"In healthcare, the stakes are particularly high. Healthcare organisations require enterprise-grade gen AI solutions, grounded in real data,” said Aashima Gupta, global director for healthcare strategy and solutions, Google Cloud.

Vertex AI Search for Healthcare can help clinicians get the right information and insights at the right time to inform decisions and improve the overall quality of patient care, Gupta added.

According to Google Cloud, key features of the solution include:

• Medically-Tuned Search: By enabling medically-tuned search on electronic health record data, scanned documents and other clinical data, healthcare applications can quickly provide relevant information to clinicians and decision makers.

• Configurable Cloud APIs: Healthcare application developers can integrate the medically-tuned search directly into the clinician workflow tools using configurable cloud APIs.

• Question-Answering: Clinicians can use the service to answer questions that involve an understanding of medical terminology and of the nuances of language in medical notes and scanned documents.

• Factuality: With results based on healthcare organisations' real data, the solution can cite and link to specific data points that generated the answers, providing transparency to users.

• Data Platform Integration: Google Cloud’s Healthcare Data Engine provides automated tooling and components to build a unified patient data platform. The integration of Vertex AI Search with HDE enables search and summarisation use cases without the need for custom integrations.

• Deeper Medical Understanding: Healthcare organisations can find answers to complex medical questions from within the patient's medical record and Google Cloud’s MedLM, a family of foundation models fine-tuned for healthcare industry use cases.

Additionally, Google Cloud is expanding the availability of HDE globally, along with adding updates such as allowing organisations to deploy it as a managed service, introducing a low-code graphical integrated development environment, and integration with Vertex AI Search for Healthcare and MedLM.

The company also said that two capabilities will be added to MedLM: MedLM for Chest X-ray, which can help with the classification of chest x-rays for operational, screening and diagnostic use cases. Secondly, a task-specific API called Condition Summary, which aims to provide a chronological list of patient conditions, along with AI-generated briefs about each condition, with citations from the original text.