Google pronounces recent generative AI search capabilities for doctors

Google Cloud on Monday announced recent artificial intelligence-powered search capabilities that it said will help health-care staff quickly pull accurate clinical information from several types of medical records. 

The health-care industry is home to troves of worthwhile information and data, but it could actually be difficult for clinicians to seek out because it’s often stored across multiple systems and formats. Google Cloud’s recent search tool will allow doctors to tug information from clinical notes, scanned documents and electronic health records so it could actually be accessed in a single place. 

The corporate said the brand new capabilities will ultimately save health-care staff a big period of time and energy.

“While it should save time to have the option to do this search, it must also prevent frustration on behalf of clinicians and [make] sure that they get to a solution easier,” Lisa O’Malley, senior director of product management for Cloud AI at Google Cloud told CNBC in an interview.

For example, if doctors wish to find out about a patient’s history, they not have to read through their notes, faxes and electronic health records individually. As a substitute, they will search questions similar to “What medications has this patient taken within the last 12 months?” and see the relevant information in a single place. 

Google’s recent search capabilities may also be used for other crucial applications similar to applying the right billing codes and determining whether patients meet the standards to enroll in a clinical trial, O’Malley said.

She added that the technology can cite and link to the unique source of the data, which is able to come directly from a company’s own internal data. This could help alleviate clinicians’ concerns that the AI is likely to be hallucinating, or generating inaccurate responses. 

The search features will probably be especially worthwhile to health-care staff who’re already burdened with staffing shortages and daunting amounts of clerical paperwork. 

A study funded by the American Medical Association in 2016 found that for each hour a physician spent with a patient, they spent a further two hours on administrative work. The study said physicians also are inclined to spend a further one to 2 hours doing clerical work outside of working hours, which many within the industry confer with as “pajama time.”

In 2022, 53% of physicians reported that they were feeling burned out, up from 42% in 2018, based on a January survey from Medscape.

Google hopes its recent search offerings will reduce the period of time clinicians have to spend digging through additional records and databases.

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

The brand new features will probably be offered to health and life sciences organizations through Google’s Vertex AI Search platform, which corporations in other industries can already use to conduct searches across public web sites, documents and other databases. The precise offering for health care builds on Google’s existing Healthcare API and Healthcare Data Engine products. 

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

The health-care industry has historically been more hesitant to embrace recent technology, and adoption could be even harder if health-care staff find recent solutions distracting or hard to work with. It’s something Gupta said Google has been paying close attention to. 

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

Customers can join for early access to Vertex AI Seek for health care and life sciences starting Monday, but Google Cloud has already been testing the capabilities with health organizations similar to Mayo Clinic, Hackensack Meridian Health and Highmark Health.

Mayo Clinic isn’t using the brand new Vertex AI Search tools in clinical care yet, said Cris Ross, Mayo’s chief information officer; it’s starting with administrative use cases. 

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

Down the road, Ross said, Mayo Clinic is trying to explore how Vertex AI Search tools could possibly be used to assist nurses summarize long surgical notes, sort through patients’ complex medical histories, and simply answer questions similar to “What’s the smoking status of this patient?” But for now, the organization is starting slow and examining where AI solutions like Google’s will probably be probably the most useful.

Richard Clarke, chief analytics officer at Highmark Health, said the initial response to the search tools on the organization has been “tremendous” and the corporate already has a backlog of greater than 200 use-case ideas. But just like Mayo Clinic, he said the challenge will probably be prioritizing where the technology could be most useful, constructing employees’ trust in it and deploying it at scale.

“This continues to be very early days, deployed with small teams with numerous support, really serious about this,” Clarke told CNBC in an interview.  “We’ve not gone big and wide yet, but all early signs say that that is going to be tremendously useful, and admittedly, in lots of cases, transformational for us.”

Google Cloud doesn’t access customer data or use it to coach models, and the corporate said the brand new service is compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.

Gupta said that as a patient, interacting with the health-care system can feel like a really fragmented and difficult experience, so she is worked up to see how clinicians can ultimately leverage Google’s recent tools to create a fuller picture. 

“To me, connecting the dots from the patient perspective has long been health care’s journey, however it’s hard,” Gupta said. “Now, we’re at a degree where AI is being helpful in these very practical use cases.”