Google, Mayo Clinic Launch Generative Artificial Intelligence Collab

Mayo Clinic and Google Cloud today launched a new collaboration to transform healthcare with generative artificial intelligence (AI) by enhancing clinical workflows, assisting researchers and clinicians in searching for information, and improving patient outcomes.

These efforts will be supported by Google’s Enterprise Search in Generative AI App Builder (Gen App Builder), which the company stated is now ready to support HIPAA compliance.

Using the Gen App Builder, Mayo Clinic is exploring how generative AI-based enterprise search functionality can help clinicians and other staff gather information from across the health system. This task can be difficult, as data like EHRs, clinical guidelines, and research papers often used to support clinicians’ work can be stored in various formats and locations across the enterprise.

Google’s Gen App Builder is designed to unify these data and make them more efficient to access and interpret.

"Our prioritization of patient safety, privacy, and ethical considerations, means that generative AI can have a significant and positive impact on how we work and deliver healthcare," said Cris Ross, Mayo Clinic's Chief Information Officer, in the press release. "Google Cloud's tools have the potential to unlock sources of information that typically aren't searchable in a conventional manner, or are difficult to access or interpret, from a patient's complex medical history to their imaging, genomics, and labs. Accessing insights more quickly and easily could drive more cures, create more connections with patients, and transform healthcare."

The press release further notes that generative AI technology can enable healthcare organizations to automate repetitive tasks, streamline administration, and optimize workflows in new ways. Standard AI models can analyze huge amounts of data to identify patterns, which can then be used to flag inefficiencies and improve processes.

Generative AI allows organizations to analyze these data in more sophisticated ways, interpret and organize data, or generate new information, such as images, based on that data.

"Generative AI has the potential to transform healthcare by enhancing human interactions and automating operations like never before," said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. "Mayo Clinic is a world leader in leveraging AI for good, and they are a critical partner as we identify responsible ways to bring this transformative technology to healthcare."

The collaboration builds on an existing partnership between Google and Mayo Clinic, in addition to Google’s ongoing work on healthcare generative AI.

In March, the tech company shared updates on its health AI research as part of its annual health event, The Check Up.

During the event, Google announced improvements in its medical large language model (LLM), Med-PaLM, which achieved a passing score on USMLE-style open-ended and multiple-choice questions. The tool’s successor, Med-PaLM 2, later scored an 85 percent, performing at an ‘expert’ level.

The tool became available to select customers for limited testing in April.

The company also announced a formal agreement with Mayo Clinic to advance cancer radiotherapy through the use of AI, and a deep learning tool developed as a result of the partnership has seen promising results in a validation study published in April.