Google Cloud Announces General Availability Of Vertex AI Search For Healthcare

Google Cloud is enabling general availability for its Vertex AI platform in addition to new features for its Healthcare Data Engine (HDE), the company announced in a press release this morning. The news highlights the latest effort by the cloud giant to innovate at the intersection of artificial intelligence and healthcare.

Though Vertex AI has been around for some time, the company has made numerous improvements and upgrades to the product, enabling health professionals with swifter and more robust ways to query health records, collate insights across different sources and participate in advanced analytics. The platform leverages an organization’s own data to search and generate an answer based on a user’s query, and even cites the exact source for the answer so that users can refer back to the primary documentation, if required.

Furthermore, Vertex AI has integrated Gemini and MedLM, which is Google’s cohesive set of foundation models specifically built for healthcare generative AI applications. The company’s seminal work behind MedLM provided some of the industry’s first inroads into the world of healthcare generative AI. A study published in the journal Nature discusses how the work behind MedLM entailed building the first LLM to obtain a passing score on U.S. Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) style questions. Since then, its integration across the ecosystem, including with Vertex AI, has provided organizations nationwide with numerous ways to leverage generative AI applications to augment their clinical workflows.

Additionally, the company is also making HDE globally available in order to enable better interoperability, and in conjunction with Vertex AI, provide organizations with the ability to glean deep insights from their disparate data sources.

Lisa O'Malley, Senior Director of Cloud AI Applications at Google Cloud, explains to Forbes that 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.”

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A study between Google Cloud and The Harris Poll, which the company also announced today, describes the significant benefits that generative AI can potentially offer to alleviate administrative burdens in healthcare. The report describes a variety of jarring findings, including how clinicians spend 28+ hours per week on administrative and rote tasks, that nearly 80% of providers report that these tasks divert time away from essential patient care, and also that in general, healthcare providers are quite optimistic and welcome the introduction of AI as a tool that can potentially help mitigate these burdens.

As O’Malley summarizes, “The administrative burden on healthcare workers is immense, taking precious time away from what matters most: patient care.” And in a world where healthcare workers are already at an immense shortage and burnout is at an all time high, the industry simply cannot afford any more attrition.

Aashima Gupta, Global Director of Healthcare Strategy & Solutions at Google Cloud, continues to be optimistic, however: “As healthcare workers are stretched thin, they can save time by using Vertex AI Search to summarize records and pinpoint exactly what a clinician needs to know...We see gen AI-based search as a great assistive technology that can help doctors and nurses quickly find the information they need.”

Nevertheless, Google Cloud is not the only one that is privy to the immense value that AI can add to this space. Just last week, Microsoft announced its own progress in the field, introducing numerous new tools for healthcare organizations including advanced medical imaging foundation models and new ways to build AI powered assistants for healthcare workers. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is also making significant advances in this arena; the company is working with Radiology Partners, one of the largest imaging groups, to enable artificial intelligence use-cases for medical imaging. AWS has also supported a specialized focus in the life sciences and pharmaceuticals spaces; its work with Merck has helped the pharmaceutical giant to leverage cloud and AI tools to make the drug discovery and clinical trial process more efficient.

Undoubtedly, the rapid advancements and progress in this area are promising. As the research clearly indicates, healthcare organizations and workers alike stand to gain immense benefits from these tools, if they are developed correctly. For this to occur, however, competition in this arena must not slow down; rather, innovators must resolutely commit to a higher standard in order to create an ecosystem that is not only efficient and affordable, but also ethical, responsible and scalable for the long-term.