Google Cloud said in a news release this morning that it is making its Vertex AI platform generally available and adding additional functionality to its Healthcare Data Engine (HDE). The article focuses on the cloud giant’s most recent initiative to develop at the nexus of healthcare and AI.
Despite being around for a while, Vertex AI has undergone a number of enhancements and modifications that have given medical practitioners faster and more reliable ways to query medical records, compile information from various sources, and engage in advanced analytics. Based on a user’s query, the platform searches and generates an answer using an organization’s own data. It even provides a citation to the precise source of the answer so that users can consult the original material if necessary.
Additionally, Google’s comprehensive collection of foundation models designed especially for healthcare generative AI applications, Gemini and MedLM, have been integrated by Vertex AI. The business made some of the earliest forays into the field of healthcare generative AI with its groundbreaking work on MedLM. The effort behind MedLM involved creating the first LLM to receive a passing score on questions similar to those in the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE), according to a paper published in the journal Nature. Since then, companies throughout the country have had a plethora of options to use generative AI applications to enhance their clinical workflows thanks to its inclusion throughout the ecosystem, including with Vertex AI.
Furthermore, the company is expanding HDE’s global reach to provide improved interoperability and give businesses the capacity to extract profound insights from their diverse data sources when combined with Vertex AI.
The “vision for HDE has always been to enable a world where every healthcare provider has access to a complete and accurate view of their patient’s health information, regardless of where that data resides…HDE gives healthcare organizations access to an interoperable, longitudinal record of patient data and provides clinical insights in FHIR format,” says Lisa O’Malley, Senior Director of Cloud AI Applications at Google Cloud, in an interview with Forbes.
The substantial advantages that generative AI may provide to lessen administrative strains in the healthcare industry are detailed in a study conducted by Google Cloud and The Harris Poll, which the company also revealed today. According to the report, healthcare providers are generally quite optimistic and welcome the introduction of AI as a tool that could potentially help mitigate these burdens. It also details a number of startling findings, such as the fact that clinicians spend more than 28 hours a week on administrative and repetitive tasks and that nearly 80% of providers report that these tasks take time away from critical patient care.
“The administrative load on healthcare workers is enormous, taking precious time away from what matters most: patient care,” as O’Malley sums up. Furthermore, the healthcare sector cannot afford any more attrition in a world where there is already a severe lack of professionals and burnout is at an all-time high.
“As healthcare workers are overburdened, they can save time by using Vertex AI Search to summarize records and pinpoint exactly what a clinician needs to know…,” says Aashima Gupta, Global Director of Healthcare Strategy & Solutions at Google Cloud, who remains hopeful. We believe that general artificial intelligence (AI)–based search is an excellent assistive technology that can help medical professionals obtain the information they require fast.
However, Google Cloud is not the only company aware of the enormous benefits artificial intelligence (AI) may bring to this field. Microsoft only last week revealed its own advancements in the industry, launching a plethora of new resources for healthcare institutions, such as sophisticated medical imaging foundation models and innovative approaches to creating AI-powered healthcare worker assistants. Significant progress is also being made in this area by Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is collaborating with Radiology Partners, one of the biggest imaging groups, to enable medical imaging use cases for artificial intelligence. AWS has also backed a specialized focus in the pharmaceutical and life sciences sectors; through its partnership with Merck, the pharmaceutical behemoth has been able to use cloud and AI technologies to improve the efficiency of the clinical trial and drug discovery processes.
The rapid developments and growth in this field are very encouraging. If properly created, these tools have the potential to greatly benefit healthcare organizations and employees, as the research makes abundantly evident. However, for this to happen, competition in this field must not slow down; instead, innovators must firmly commit to a higher standard in order to build an ecosystem that is not just economical and efficient but also morally upright, accountable, and long-term scalable.
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