Google Cloud Introduces Vertex AI Search, Data Engine For Healthcare Organisations

Google Cloud has announced that Vertex AI Search for Healthcare and several new features for Healthcare Data Engine are now generally available to global customers.

Vertex AI Search for Healthcare helps developers build assistive technology for healthcare workers to alleviate administrative burdens, and Healthcare Data Engine helps organisations build an interoperable data platform, the foundation of generative artificial intelligence.

Clinicians are spending nearly 28 hours per week, and medical office staff are spending 34 hours per week on tasks like documentation, scheduling, billing and coding, and inventory management. Claims staff face a similar burden, dedicating 36 hours per week to administrative duties.

This has resulted in 82% of clinicians, 81% of medical staff and 77% of claims staff reporting feeling burnt out, according to a Google Cloud report. It impacts the quality of care, as 80% of providers acknowledge that administrative tasks take away from patient interaction.

Through intelligent search, Vertex AI can potentially improve how healthcare professionals find information within health records and medical documents. Its integration with Gemini 1.5 Flash and MedLM—Google's family of large language models trained on medical data—allows the tool to also generate answers to questions about the patient record.

Vertex AI Search uses the organisation's data to search, grounding gen AI outputs in data to reduce the risks of hallucinations or inaccurate responses. It can cite and link to original, internal sources of the information, Google Cloud said.

The company also announced that Healthcare Data Engine is now available globally, including regions where Google Cloud's Healthcare API is available. The tool provides a longitudinal record of patient data and clinical insights in FHIR format, the healthcare industry standard. It also includes a new data mapping tool—Data Mapper—that brings a graphical mapping interface into the product.

Google Cloud said that healthcare customers retain control over their data. Access and use of patient data is protected through secure infrastructure and compliant data storage, along with customer's security, privacy controls and processes.