Google Cloud announced in a press release earlier today that it is making its Vertex AI platform widely available and adding more capability to its Healthcare Data Engine (HDE). The piece is centered on the cloud giant’s latest effort to innovate at the intersection of healthcare and AI.
Even though it has been around for some time, Vertex AI has seen a series of improvements and changes that have provided medical professionals quicker and more efficient means of querying medical histories, aggregating data from different sources, and partaking in sophisticated analytics. Depending on a user’s question, the platform searches and returns an answer based on an organization’s internal data. It even includes a reference to the exact source of the response so that users can refer to the original content if needed.
The large, general-purpose set of foundation models specifically developed for healthcare generative AI use cases, Gemini and MedLM, have also been integrated by Vertex AI. The company made some of the first forays in the space of healthcare generative AI with its pioneering research in MedLM. The work that went into MedLM was developing the first LLM to pass on questions comparable to the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE), states a paper in the Nature journal. Since then, businesses across the nation have had an abundance of choices to leverage generative AI applications to augment their clinical workflows through its availability across the ecosystem, including with Vertex AI.
In addition, the company is bringing HDE to a broader global audience to offer enhanced interoperability and to empower companies with the ability to draw deep insights from their heterogeneous data sources when combined with Vertex AI.
The “vision for HDE has always been to make possible a world in which all healthcare professionals have access to a whole and accurate picture of their patient’s health information, wherever that information may live…”HDE provides healthcare organizations access to an interoperable, longitudinal patient data set and offers clinical insights in FHIR format,” says Lisa O’Malley, Senior Director of Cloud AI Applications at Google Cloud, in a Forbes interview.
The significant benefits that generative AI can offer to reduce administrative burdens on the healthcare sector are outlined in a Google Cloud and The Harris Poll study published by the company today. The report suggests healthcare professionals are generally very positive and embrace the emergence of AI as an innovation that could potentially alleviate these pressures. It also reports on a series of surprising findings, including that clinicians devote over 28 hours a week to administrative and repetitive work and that nearly 80% of providers say that these activities divert time away from essential patient care.
“The administrative burden on healthcare professionals is staggering, stealing valuable time away from what counts most: patient care,” as O’Malley summarizes. In addition, the healthcare industry cannot lose any more talent in a world where there is already a critical shortage of professionals and burnout is at an all-time high.
As the healthcare professionals are overwhelmed, they can save time by utilizing Vertex AI Search to abstract records and identify precisely what a clinician must know…,” says Google Cloud’s Global Director of Healthcare Strategy & Solutions, Aashima Gupta, who is still optimistic. In our opinion, general artificial intelligence (AI)-based search is a great aid technology that is able to make medical professionals achieve the information that they need in a timely fashion.
Yet, Google Cloud is not alone in recognizing the staggering potential artificial intelligence (AI) can have in this sector. Microsoft only recently announced its own breakthroughs in the sector, introducing a plethora of new tools for healthcare facilities, including advanced medical imaging foundation models and novel methods for developing AI-driven healthcare worker assistants. Significant advancements are also being done in this regard by Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is working with Radiology Partners, one of the largest imaging groups, to make medical imaging use cases available for artificial intelligence. AWS has also supported a niche emphasis in the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries; through its collaboration with Merck, the pharmaceutical giant has been able to leverage cloud and AI technologies to enhance the effectiveness of the clinical trial and drug discovery processes.
The fast-paced advancements and progress in this sector are highly inspiring. If well designed, such tools can significantly contribute to the well-being of healthcare organizations and workers, as the study amply confirms. But for this to be a reality, competition within this sector should not be contained but rather accelerations urged so that innovators resolutely stake a better standard for setting up an ecosystem that is not only economical and effective but also ethical and moral, answerable, and sustainable on the long term.