Google Cloud Announces Generative AI Search Capabilities for Healthcare

Google Cloud has announced new capabilities in Vertex AI Search for healthcare and life sciences organizations that support generative AI-powered search on a range of data, including clinical notes.

Vertex AI Search capabilities integrate with Google Cloud's Healthcare API and Healthcare Data Engine, as well as with Google Health's search and intelligent summarization capabilities from its pilot product, Care Studio.

Google Cloud customers can sign up for early access to Vertex AI Search features for healthcare and life sciences to test it out and share feedback.

"Bringing Google-quality, gen AI search capabilities across an organization's entire ecosystem, including EHRs, has the potential to dramatically improve efficiencies, provide clinical decision support, and increase the quality of care clinicians can give patients," Burak Gokturk, VP and general manager of cloud AI and industry solutions for Google Cloud, said in a press release.

"Making Vertex AI Search more useful for healthcare and life science organizations is a priority for us because we know that having the right information and insights at the right time can make all the difference in health," Gokturk added.

The new capabilities build upon Vertex AI Search's ability to set up question-answering and conversational search applications powered by foundation models. Features in Vertex AI Search tuned for healthcare and life sciences are set to give customers the ability to find accurate clinical information more efficiently.

In healthcare settings, access and use of patient data is protected through the implementation of Google Cloud's infrastructure and secure data storage that support HIPAA compliance, as well as each customer's security, privacy controls, and processes.

Additionally, Vertex AI Search, Healthcare Data Engine, and Healthcare API support HIPAA compliance. The new Vertex AI Search features for healthcare and life science companies will also support HIPAA compliance.

"Now that we've moved our significant data, applications workload, and other IT resources from on-premises to Google Cloud, using gen AI for search over our enterprise data has the potential to dramatically improve the information and insights we can deliver to our clinicians and our other team members," said Kash Patel, EVP and chief digital information officer for Hackensack Meridian Health.

"Data is at the core of how we are modernizing healthcare, and Vertex AI Search for healthcare and life sciences will help us make the most of our data," Patel added.

Google Cloud customers will be able to leverage Vertex AI Search features for healthcare and life sciences alongside Med-PaLM 2, Google's medically-tuned large language model.

While Med-PaLM 2 is trained in complex medical topics, the new Vertex AI Search features for healthcare and life sciences will deliver medically-tuned search capabilities based in the patient record.

When combined, these features are set to help healthcare organizations access the most relevant answers to medical questions from world knowledge as well as within the patient's medical record for clinical decision support.