Google Cloud Announces Bold And Promising Vision For Healthcare In 2024

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Google Cloud announced today its bold vision for healthcare for the year ahead.

Without a doubt, the company has made a name for itself in the healthcare space over the last few years. Notably, with the recent boom centered around artificial intelligence, Google Cloud has been at the forefront of innovation.

2023 was one of the best years for Google Cloud, as the organization was able to deploy years worth of investments and research through a variety of different products. For healthcare, among the most notable products were Vertex AI Search and the company’s latest release, MedLM—a family of foundation models specifically built with healthcare industry use cases in mind.

Vertex AI Search made a splash last year as one of the first services in the industry that could empower organizations to harness the power of generative AI search for healthcare applications. Specifically, the technology gives users the ability to search and glean insights from a broad spectrum of clinically relevant sources such as clinical notes, electronic health records and other documents. Notable customers ranging from Hackensack Meridian Health and Highmark Health to the Mayo Clinic and Meditech are already employing this technology.

MedLM was another groundbreaking release by the company in 2023, building on earlier iterations of Med-PaLM and years of deep research in this space. The purpose of MedLM is to empower organizations with the power of artificial intelligence across a broad range of applications and tasks. For example, I recently wrote about Augmedix, which provides ground-breaking ambient dictation technology for clinicians. Augmedix’s core technology leverages Google Cloud’s MedLM on Vertex AI along with natural language processing to translate data into drafts of medical notes. Another key example is in the life-sciences space; companies such as BenchSci are harnessing MedLM to make their drug research, discovery and development process more reliable and precise.

And all of this was just 2023.

Aashima Gupta, Global Director of Healthcare Strategy & Solutions at Google Cloud, thoughtfully explains that 2023 was just the beginning of this new era; 2024 will see incredible progress as the technology transitions from experimentation and trials to actual, real world use-cases to help organizations gain better insights from their data, decrease administrative burdens for clinicians, and palpably help enterprises become more successful and efficient.

Gupta tactfully explains the journey ahead as encompassing three broad categories: Short-term optimization, which refers to leveraging AI to help ease the immediate administrative burdens and cognitive burdens faced by health systems and practitioners; Long-term transformation, which refers to using the power of this new technology to create more efficient clinical workflows, gain better insights from existing information and enable interoperability across data sources; and finally, profound learning, which alludes to the fact that the entire ecosystem, including Google, healthcare organizations, and policymakers, will continue to learn how to truly marry artificial intelligence with the complexities and nuances of care delivery and healthcare outcomes.

As Gupta so poignantly states, “ultimately, this cutting edge technology will drive a new understanding about health and healthcare.”

Nevertheless, although the broad outlook for this technology is optimistic, the work is not easy by any means. For one, the level of rigor and investment required to have breakthroughs in this field is immense. Secondly, the competition to innovate is profound. Technology companies across the spectrum are swiftly escalating their efforts to have a bite at this apple; take for example Microsoft, which has rapidly scaled up its offerings in the healthcare AI space recently, especially with the release of Azure Health Bot. Similarly, Amazon has invested heavily to empower organizations with the means to deploy healthcare analytics and machine learning tools.

In addition to the fierce competition on the software and platform side, hardware has also been top of mind for these companies, as these complex platforms and services also require incredibly high computing power. NVIDIA saw exponential growth last year for this very reason, given its industry-leading GPUs that have shown incredible promise. Other contenders such as AMD and even Google, given its efforts with Tensor, are making valiant strides in this arena.

Without a doubt, 2024 will be one of the most paramount years for this technology and for the healthcare industry in general. In this arena, the road ahead for Google is bold, ambitious and incredibly promising, given the years of research, investment, and resources the company has dedicated to these efforts.