Google to Provide Doctors With New Generative Artificial Intelligence Search Capabilities
Google Cloud recently announced new AI-powered search functionalities that it claimed will help doctors and health professionals quickly get accurate clinical data from different kinds of medical reports and records.
The healthcare and medical space is home to tons of valuable data and information. However, it can sometimes be very difficult for doctors to find that same information since it is often stored across many different formats and systems. The new search tool from Google Cloud will allow clinicians to pool data from electronic health records, scanned documents, and clinical notes into one place for easy access.
What does Google say?
The company claimed that the new capabilities will eventually help save healthcare professionals a huge amount of both energy and time.
Google AI at Google Cloud’s senior director of project management, Lisa O’Malley said, “While it should save time to be able to do that search, it should also prevent frustration on behalf of clinicians and [make] sure that they get to an answer easier.”
For example, if a physician wants to know the history of one of their patients, they don’t need to read through their electronic health records, faxes, and notes separately anymore. Instead, doctors can search queries like “What medicine has this person taken in the past 6 months?” and find all the relevant data related to that query in one place.
Doctors can also use these new search capabilities for other vital applications like determining whether a patient meets the criteria for a certain clinical trial and inputting correct billing codes. She added that the tech can link to and cite the original source, which it’ll get directly from an institution’s own internal data.
Google’s vision for this new technology
Google hopes these new capabilities will help decrease the amount of time and energy doctors usually spend when digging through medical databases and patient records.
O’Malley said, “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 think ultimately benefits us as patients.”
The new functionalities will be provided to life sciences and health organizations via the Vertex AI Search platform, also by Google, which corporations in other industries are already using to do their searches across public databases, documents, and websites.
Google Cloud global director of healthcare and solutions, Aashima Gupta said, “These are the workflows that the physicians and nurses live by day in and day out. You can’t be adding friction to it. 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.”
