Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the corporate in 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google Cloud on Monday announced new artificial intelligence-powered search capabilities that it said will help health-care employees quickly pull accurate clinical information from several types of medical records.
The health-care industry is home to troves of priceless information and data, but it may well be difficult for clinicians to seek out because it’s often stored across multiple systems and formats. Google Cloud’s new search tool will allow doctors to tug information from clinical notes, scanned documents and electronic health records so it may well be accessed in a single place.
The corporate said the new capabilities will ultimately save health-care employees a major period of time and energy.
“While it should save time to give you the chance to do this search, it also needs to 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 must read through their notes, faxes and electronic health records individually. As an alternative, 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 new search capabilities can be used for other crucial applications similar to applying the proper 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.
Google Cloud headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.
Google Cloud
The search features can be especially priceless to health-care employees 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 every hour a physician spent with a patient, they spent a further two hours on administrative work. The study said physicians also are likely 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 new search offerings will reduce the period of time clinicians must 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 believe ultimately advantages us as patients,” O’Malley said.
The new features can 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 new Vertex AI Search capabilities can integrate directly right into a clinician’s workflow, which is of high importance for customers in the sphere.
The health-care industry has historically been more hesitant to embrace new technology, and adoption might be even harder if health-care employees find new 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 may’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 facility of this technology.”
Customers can enroll for early access to Vertex AI Search 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 is just not using the 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 seeking 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 can be essentially 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 can be prioritizing where the technology might be most useful, constructing employees’ trust in it and deploying it at scale.
“This remains to be very early days, deployed with small teams with plenty of support, really occupied with 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 albeit, 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 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 happy to see how clinicians can ultimately leverage Google’s new tools to create a fuller picture.
“To me, connecting the dots from the patient perspective has long been health care’s journey, nevertheless it’s hard,” Gupta said. “Now, we’re at some extent where AI is being helpful in these very practical use cases.”