On Monday, Google Cloud unveiled new artificial intelligence-powered search features that, according to the company, will make it easier for medical professionals to swiftly and accurately extract clinical data from various kinds of medical records.
The health care sector is home to vast amounts of important data and information, but finding it can be difficult for clinicians because it’s frequently spread across several systems and formats. Doctors will be able to access information from clinical notes, scanned documents, and electronic health records in one location thanks to Google Cloud’s new search function.
According to the corporation, the new features will ultimately result in significant time and energy savings for healthcare staff.
According to Lisa O’Malley, senior director of product management for Cloud AI at Google Cloud, “while it should save time to be able to do that search, it should also prevent frustration on behalf of clinicians and [make] sure that they get to an answer easier.”
Doctors no longer have to look through notes, faxes, and electronic health data separately to learn about a patient’s history, for example. Instead, they can use search to find the pertinent data in one place by asking queries like “What medications has this patient taken in the last 12 months?”
According to O’Malley, Google’s new search skills can also be utilized for other essential tasks including applying the proper billing codes and identifying whether patients satisfy the requirements to participate in a clinical research.
The technology, she continued, can cite and link to the information’s original source, which will be an organization’s own internal data. This ought to allay clinicians’ worries that the AI might be delusional or producing false results.
According to a 2016 American Medical Association-funded study, doctors spent an additional two hours on administrative tasks for every hour they spent with patients. According to the survey, physicians frequently work an additional one to two hours of clerical tasks after hours, which many in the field refer to as “pajama time.”
According to a January poll by Medscape, more doctors reported feeling burned out in 2022 than did so in 2018, up from 42%.
Google expects that its updated search capabilities would cut down on the time that clinicians must spend sifting through additional files and databases.
“I think that ultimately it benefits us as patients,” O’Malley said, “anything that Google can do by applying our search technologies, our health-care technologies, and our research capabilities to make the journey of the clinicians, health-care providers, and payers more quick, more efficient, and saving them cost.”
Through Google’s Vertex AI Search platform, which other industries’ businesses already use to conduct searches across public websites, papers, and other datasets, the new functionality will be made available to health and life sciences enterprises. The specific healthcare solution expands upon Google’s current Healthcare Data Engine and Healthcare API capabilities.
The new Vertex AI Search capabilities may integrate directly into a clinician’s workflow, according to Aashima Gupta, global director of healthcare strategy and solutions at Google Cloud, which is extremely important for customers in the field.
Historically, the healthcare sector has been slower to adopt new technologies, and adoption may become even more difficult if healthcare professionals find new solutions distracting or challenging to use. Gupta claimed that Google had been closely monitoring it.
The doctors and nurses “live by these workflows day in and day out. You can’t be making it more difficult,” Gupta said in an interview with CNBC. We take great care to respect their workspace and the surface they utilize while yet enabling them to benefit from the technology.
Beginning on Monday, customers can sign up for early access to Vertex AI Search for healthcare and life sciences, although Google Cloud has already been testing the features with healthcare institutions like Mayo Clinic, Hackensack Meridian Health, and Highmark Health.
The early response to the search tools at the company has been “tremendous,” according to Richard Clarke, chief analytics officer at Highmark Health, and the business already has a backlog of more than 200 use-case ideas. He added that the challenge will be deciding where the technology can be most helpful, earning the trust of the workforce, and implementing it widely, much like Mayo Clinic.
“This is still very early days, deployed with small teams with lots of support, really thinking about this,” Clarke said in an interview with CNBC. Although we haven’t spread widely yet, all early indications indicate that this will be extremely helpful and, quite honestly, revolutionary for us in many circumstances.
Google Cloud claims that the new service complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, and does not access user data or use it to train models.
Patient interaction with the healthcare system, according to Gupta, may feel highly fragmented and difficult, so she is eager to see how clinicians will finally use Google’s new tools to paint a more complete picture.
The trajectory of health care, according to Gupta, has been one of “connecting the dots from the patient perspective, but it’s hard.” We have reached a point where AI is useful in some very real-world application situations.
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