Google Cloud has announced updates to three solutions aiming to support healthcare and life sciences organisations in enabling interoperability, building stronger data foundations and deploying generative AI tools in the hopes of improving patient outcomes.
A key update centres around increased interoperability between the three solutions: Vertex AI Search for Healthcare; MedLM; and Healthcare Data Engine. Vertex AI Search for Healthcare offers medically-tuned, generative AI search on a “broad spectrum of data” including clinical notes and FHIR data; the update means that its search and question-answering functionalities can now integrate with the other three solutions, as well as integrating with Cloud Healthcare FHIR APIs. Google states that this should “make it easier for healthcare and life science organisations to build the data analytics and AI solutions needed for next era health systems”.
A further update sees the launch of a new service for Healthcare Data Engine, including the ability to deploy the solution on a pay-as-you-go rate; global roll-out to “most cloud regions” in Europe and in the Asia Pacific; and the introduction of a low-code graphical integrated development environment called HDE Data Mapper, designed to help customers build longitudinal patient records in FHIR format to power gen AI applications.
Two new capabilities have also been added to MedLM, described as “a family of foundation models fine-tuned for healthcare industry use cases”. MedLM for Chest X-ray converts images into embeddings with the aim of supporting classification of chest x-rays for operational, screening and diagnostic use cases; and Condition Summary is a task-specific API designed to provide a chronological list of patient conditions with AI-generated briefs about each.
Read more about the developments here.
Last month, we reported the news that South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub has announced a three-year partnership with Google aiming to bring investment in the region’s health tech research and training, with a focus on tackling inequalities and driving economic growth.
We also covered Google’s insights into the development of its new Thermometer app for smartphones, which forms part of the January pixel feature drop for the Pixel 8 Pro and enables users to scan someone’s forehead with their smartphone in order to measure body temperature.
