The American Hospital Association (AHA) is reporting that tech giants, such as Google and Microsoft, are jumping feet first into the healthcare market with new platforms and electronic applications that will have the cumulative effect of enhancing patient care. The following is a summary of the AHA report.
Google Gizmos
America’s go-to search engine, Google, is not content to stay in the browser lane. They have embarked on a concerted effort to stake their claim in the healthcare space by leveraging a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI). The cloud-based systems will not only assist clinicians but are “designed to help users find relevant information over a broader spectrum of data types.”
Last December, Google launched MedLM, a suite of new health-related AI modules designed to help clinicians and researchers carry out complex studies, summarize physician-patient interactions and more. Among these is Gemini, the company’s latest and most powerful AI module. Google’s plan is to license Gemini to its Google Cloud customers for use in their own applications. The AI tool will power consumer-facing Google AI apps like the Bard chatbot and Search Generative Experience.
Last March, Google launched Med-PaLM 2, the next version of its Med-PaLM large language model (LLM) that is designed to provide quality responses to medical questions. The company says Med-PaLM 2 consistently performed at an “expert” level on medical exam questions with more than 85-percent accuracy. The company also is testing responses from real clinicians. Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, was involved in testing the Med-PaLM 2 model.
Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search for healthcare organizations was launched last fall. It facilitates a medically tuned, AI-powered search on a broad spectrum of data, including clinical sources. In addition, HCA Healthcare partnered with Google to create AI tools that can document emergency department visits and accelerate nurse handoffs.
Microsoft Machines
A Deloitte report from 2022 notes that 30 percent of global data is generated by the health and life sciences field, but about 97 percent of it remains unused. Last year, computer-based behemoth Microsoft began expanding its data and AI products to help hospitals and clinicians learn more from the ocean of information they collect.
In October, the company developed new healthcare tools in its Fabric data and analytics platform to help eliminate the time-consuming process of searching through multiple sources like EHRs, images, lab systems, medical devices and claims systems one by one. The platform will enable organizations to standardize data from all these sources and access them in the same place.
Microsoft also released new healthcare AI capabilities through its Azure AI platform. “Azure AI Health Insights will provide prebuilt models that can generate insights for use by clinicians to analyze unstructured patient data to create a chronological timeline of a patient’s medical history,” according to AHA. The program will also simplify clinical reports so that medical literature and terminology can be shared with patients. The Azure AI “Health Bot” can be customized and embedded into clinical workflows to provide Microsoft reports.
Last November, Massachusetts General Brigham became one of the first health systems to use an AI-powered radiology “co-pilot” from Nuance, a Microsoft subsidiary. The PowerScribe Smart Impression technology drafts impressions for radiologists, which ends up saving them up to one minute per read, according to Nuance estimates. In addition, St. Louis-based Mercy health system entered into a three-year partnership with Microsoft to use the company’s AI tools, such as AI-powered assisted communication that will aid patients in understanding their lab results. The technology will also be used to recommend follow-up actions during initial patient calls and help staff find information about Mercy’s policies.
Microsoft officials announced in August that clients that utilize the Epic electronic medical record (EMR) platform can run their databases on Microsoft’s Azure Large Instances program. The application can run up to 50 million database accesses per second, according to the company.
Adoption of these latest generation AI solutions are expected to more than double this year. According to the AHA, “the trick will be getting large health systems—those that stand to have the most to gain from the technology—to invest.”