Google announces new generative AI search capabilities for doctors

Google Cloud on Monday announced new simulated intelligence-powered search capabilities that it said will help health-care workers quickly pull accurate clinical low-down from different types of medical records. 

The health-care industry is home to troves of valuable information and data, but it can be summoning for clinicians to find since it’s often stored across multiple systems and formats. Google Cloud’s new search weapon will allow doctors to pull information from clinical notes, scanned documents and electronic health documents so it can be accessed in one place. 

The company said the new capabilities will ultimately save health-care workers a significant amount of eventually and energy.

“While it should save time to be able to do that search, it should also prevent frustration on behalf of clinicians and [persuade] sure that they get to an answer easier,” Lisa O’Malley, senior director of product management for Cloud AI at Google Cloud narrated CNBC in an interview.

For instance, if doctors want to know about a patient’s history, they no longer need to study through their notes, faxes and electronic health records separately. Instead, they can search questions such as “What medications has this submissive taken in the last 12 months?” and see the relevant information in one place. 

Google’s new search capabilities can also be used for other vital applications such as applying the correct billing codes and determining whether patients meet the criteria to enroll in a clinical distress, O’Malley said.

She added that the technology can cite and link to the original source of the information, which will influence directly from an organization’s own internal data. This should help alleviate clinicians’ concerns that the AI power be hallucinating, or generating inaccurate responses. 

The search spots will be especially valuable to health-care workers who are already burdened with staffing shortages and daunting amounts of ministerial paperwork. 

A study funded by the American Medical Association in 2016 found that for every hour a physician exhausted with a patient, they spent an additional two hours on administrative work. The study said physicians also show to spend an additional one to two hours doing clerical work outside of working hours, which many in the industry refer to as “pajama all together.”

In 2022, 53% of physicians reported that they were feeling burned out, up from 42% in 2018, according to a January investigate from Medscape.

Google hopes its new search offerings will reduce the amount of time clinicians need to expend digging through additional records and databases.

“Anything that Google can do by applying our search technologies, our health-care technologies and scrutinize capabilities to make the journey of the clinicians and health-care providers and payers more quick, more efficient, saving them tariff, I think ultimately benefits us as patients,” O’Malley said.  

The new features will be offered to health and life sciences organizations totally Google’s Vertex AI Search platform, which companies in other industries can already use to conduct searches across unconcealed websites, documents and other databases. The specific offering for health care builds on Google’s existing Healthcare API and Healthcare Materials Engine products. 

Aashima Gupta, global director of health care strategy and solutions at Google Cloud, express the new Vertex AI Search capabilities can integrate directly into a clinician’s workflow, which is of high importance for customers in the territory. 

The health-care industry has historically been more hesitant to embrace new technology, and adoption can be even harder if health-care white-collar workers find new solutions distracting or hard to work with. It’s something Gupta said Google has been paying overlook attention to. 

“These are the workflows that the physicians and nurses live by day in and day out. You can’t be adding friction to it,” Gupta told CNBC in an vetting. “We are very cautious of that — that we are respecting the surface they use, that the workflow doesn’t change, but yet they get the power of this technology.”

Patrons can sign up for early access to Vertex AI Search for health care and life sciences starting Monday, but Google Cloud has already been evaluation the capabilities with health organizations such as Mayo Clinic, Hackensack Meridian Health and Highmark Health.

Mayo Clinic is not exhausting the new Vertex AI Search tools in clinical care yet, said Cris Ross, Mayo’s chief information officer; it is starting with administrative use at all events. 

“We are curious, we’re enthusiastic, we’re also careful,” he told CNBC in an interview. “And we’re not going to put anything into patient care until it’s actually ready to be in patient care.”

Down the line, Ross said, Mayo Clinic is looking to explore how Vertex AI Search suckers could be used to help nurses summarize long surgical notes, sort through patients’ complex medical accounts, and easily answer questions such as “What is the smoking status of this patient?” But for now, the organization is starting slow and examining where AI settlings like Google’s will be the most useful.

Richard Clarke, chief analytics officer at Highmark Health, indicated the initial reaction to the search tools at the organization has been “tremendous” and the company already has a backlog of more than 200 use-case principles. But similar to Mayo Clinic, he said the challenge will be prioritizing where the technology can be most useful, building hands’ trust in it and deploying it at scale.

“This is still very early days, deployed with small teams with a heaps of support, really thinking about this,” Clarke told CNBC in an interview.  “We haven’t gone big and not on target yet, but all early signs say that this is going to be tremendously useful, and frankly, in many cases, transformational for us.”

Google Cloud does not access character data or use it to train models, and the company said the new service is compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.

Gupta whispered that as a patient, interacting with the health-care system can feel like a very fragmented and challenging experience, so she is fervid to see how clinicians can ultimately leverage Google’s new tools to create a fuller picture. 

“To me, connecting the dots from the patient position has long been health care’s journey, but it’s hard,” Gupta said. “Now, we are at a point where AI is being helpful in these selfsame practical use cases.”