Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai giving a keynote address at the Google I/O developer conference held at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California on May 10, 2023.
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As Google’s cloud business expands its use of new artificial intelligence technologies in healthcare, Mayo Clinic’s medical professionals will be able to quickly find patient information using tools that power the latest chatbots. became.
Google Cloud announced Wednesday that the Mayo Clinic is testing a new service called Enterprise Search with its Generative AI App Builder, which was introduced Tuesday. With this tool, our client will be able to use his Google technology to create their own chatbot to explore large amounts of different internal data.
In the medical field, this means that employees can more quickly interpret data such as patient histories, imaging records, genomics and labs with simple queries, even when the information is stored in different formats and locations. To do. One of his top U.S. hospital systems with dozens of locations, the Mayo Clinic is an early adopter of Google’s technology as it seeks to power the use of generative AI in its healthcare system.
The Mayo Clinic plans to test different use cases for the search tool in the coming months, and Mayo Clinic chief technology officer Vish Anantraman says the search tool is used in administrative tasks that often lead to burnout. He said it was already “very well done” in helping clinicians to do this.
For example, if a doctor wants to see information about a cohort of female patients aged 45 to 55, such as mammograms and charts, they can enter that query into the search tool rather than searching for each element individually. . Similarly, if a doctor wants to know which clinical trials might be suitable for a patient, they can also search for it.
“This will save a lot of time, prevent physician burnout and reduce administrative overload,” Anantraman said in a CNBC interview.
Generative AI has been the hottest topic in the tech industry since late 2022, when Microsoft-backed OpenAI launched its chatbot ChatGPT to the public. In a rush to catch up, Google rolled out the Bard AI chat service earlier this year, pushing the underlying technology into as many products as possible. Healthcare is a particularly challenging industry because there is less room for false answers and hallucinations that occur when AI models completely fabricate information.
Ashima Gupta, global director of healthcare strategy and solutions at Google Cloud, said Google is taking a “safer than speed” approach with its enterprise search tools, and that’s partly because the company is more like the Mayo Clinic than Rolling. He said that’s why it’s limited to early adopters. We will spread the word more widely.
“We want to be very thoughtful and responsible about how we leverage powerful tools like generative AI in the corporate environment, especially in healthcare,” Gupta said in an interview with CNBC. said.
Google said its approach to privacy ensures customers are in control of their data, and said the new service complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Anantraman said the Mayo Clinic has created a “safe sandbox” for employees to test applications of the technology and identify where it is most useful.
“We take patient data privacy very seriously and put our patients’ needs first,” he said. “That’s one reason healthcare organizations in general need to be very cautious when introducing technology that the industry may not have tested and vetted enough.”
Google Cloud and the Mayo Clinic entered into a 10-year partnership in 2019. Mayo said at the time that it had chosen Google Cloud as the “foundation for its digital transformation.” The partnership, announced Wednesday, marks the first step in an expanded agreement between the companies to work together on AI applications in healthcare.
clock: CNBC’s interview with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian
