Google Cloud Unveils New Generative AI Solutions for Healthcare and Life Sciences

What You Should Know:

– At HIMSS24, Google Cloud announced a suite of new generative AI solutions designed to address key challenges faced by healthcare and life sciences organizations.

– These solutions focus on improving interoperability, building a strong data foundation, and deploying generative AI (gen AI) tools to enhance patient outcomes.

Unlocking Gen AI to Improve Healthcare Efficiency

The healthcare industry is grappling with rising administrative costs, clinician burnout, and a global nursing shortage. Google Cloud emphasizes that gen AI solutions can empower healthcare workers and improve overall efficiency.

Introducing Vertex AI Search for Healthcare

Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search for Healthcare empowers developers to build assistive technology that reduces administrative burdens for clinicians. This search tool offers several key features:

Medically-Tuned Search: Surfaces relevant information from diverse data sources (EHRs, scanned documents) without sifting through pages of notes.

Configurable APIs: Integrates seamlessly with clinician workflow tools.

Question-Answering: Allows clinicians to ask natural language questions about patient data (e.g., “Does the patient have a history of cancer?”).

Factuality: Results are grounded in real patient data and linked to specific data points for transparency and reduced risk of errors.

Data Platform Integration: Works with Healthcare Data Engine (HDE) for a unified patient data platform.

Deeper Medical Understanding: Complements MedLM tools for comprehensive medical information retrieval.

Early access to Vertex AI Search for Healthcare and life science integration with MedLM will be available to select customers.

“Not all generative AI is created equal, and in healthcare, the stakes are particularly high,” said Aashima Gupta, global director for Healthcare Strategy & Solutions, Google Cloud. “Healthcare organizations require enterprise-grade gen AI solutions, grounded in real data. Vertex AI Search for Healthcare is already making a difference for healthcare organizations by helping ensure clinicians have the right information and insights at the right time to inform decisions and improve the overall quality of patient care.”

Healthcare Data Engine Update

Google Cloud unveiled an update to Healthcare Data Engine (HDE), a managed service that helps organizations build interoperable data platforms. Key updates include:

Simplified Management and Pricing: Consumption-based pricing model makes HDE more accessible.

Global Availability: Expands beyond North America to Europe and Asia Pacific regions.

Low-Code Data Mapping: HDE Data Mapper facilitates data transformation for building high-quality longitudinal patient records in FHIR format.

Foundation for AI and Analytics: Integration with Vertex AI Search allows for comprehensive data exploration and empowers clinicians to save valuable time.

MedLM Gets Smarter

MedLM, a suite of AI models for healthcare, offers new capabilities:

MedLM for Chest X-ray: Classifies chest x-rays for various use cases.

Condition Summary API: Generates a chronological list of patient conditions with AI-powered summaries and citations.

Focus on Data Security and Control

Google Cloud prioritizes data security. Patient data access and use is protected by robust infrastructure, secure data storage compliant with HIPAA, and adherence to customer-defined security and privacy controls.

Continuous Innovation

Google Cloud is committed to ongoing development. New functionalities will be added to the MedLM suite in the coming months, offering even more capabilities for healthcare and life science organizations.