Google Cloud has announced new capabilities in Vertex AI Search aimed at improving efficiency and quality of care for healthcare and life sciences organizations. Announced today at HLTH '23, the new features combine generative AI with medically-tuned search across diverse data sources, including electronic health records.
Vertex AI Search for healthcare leverages Google's Healthcare API, Healthcare Data Engine, and search technology from its Care Studio pilot to enable natural language search on clinical data. This allows providers to efficiently find accurate information and ask questions of patient records using conversational interfaces.
Healthcare organizations face mounting problems like staff shortages, provider burnout, and ballooning administrative costs. Google states Vertex AI Search can alleviate some of these burdens by serving as an assistive tool for clinicians and staff. The technology has potential to enhance clinical decision support, workflow efficiency, and patient care quality.
Vertex AI Search builds on Google Cloud's existing natural language search and question answering capabilities. It grounds outputs in an organization's data while retaining customer control. The service also supports HIPAA compliance for protected health information.
Early adopters like Mayo Clinic, Hackensack Meridian, and Highmark Health plan to explore uses like clinical decision support, population health analytics, and patient experience improvements. MEDITECH intends to embed related search and summarization functionality from Google Health into its EHR.
Vertex AI Search combines well with Google's Med-PaLM 2 medical language model. While Med-PaLM 2 handles complex medical questions, Vertex AI Search enables patient-specific querying grounded in records. Together, they can surface relevant global medical knowledge alongside patient-specific insights.
Overall, Vertex AI Search brings Google's consumer-friendly search power to healthcare's diverse data landscape. By enabling natural language search on electronic health records and other clinical data, it has potential to enhance clinical workflows, improve staff productivity, and unlock insights that can better inform care.