Google Unveils AI-Powered Search for Medical Professionals

Google has debuted artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search capabilities designed for health care workers.

Google Cloud customers can sign up to get early access to Vertex AI Search features for health and life science firms, the tech giant announced in a Monday (Oct. 9) company blog post.

“With these new features, healthcare organizations will now have Google-quality gen AI search that is medically tuned, allowing users to find accurate clinical information much more efficiently, and to search a broad spectrum of data from clinical sources,” the company said in the post.

AI-powered search will help people in the healthcare space discover the right information and glean insights from it, helping organizations to run more effectively and improve patient care, according to the post.

For life sciences, generative AI is “driving operational efficiencies in the near term, enhancing the development of products and ultimately supporting precision medicine,” per the post.

Lisa O’Malley, senior director for product management for Cloud AI at Google, told CNBC the technology can help doctors learn a patient’s history without reviewing their own notes or other health records separately.

Rather, they can ask questions like “What medications have this patient taken in the last 12 months?” and find the pertinent information in one place, the report said.

The launch of the function is happening as generative AI faces some roadblocks to adoption in the healthcare space.

A survey by management consulting firm Bain & Company showed that the main barriers to generative AI in healthcare are a lack of resources, expertise and regulation, with data access and quality and organizational resistance close behind.

The recurring theme found in industry studies is that generative AI is still in the early stages, with time needed to earn public trust.

So far, Americans remain cautious, even if they can see AI’s benefits, according to the “Generative AI Tracker®” by PYMNTS Intelligence.

“In fact, 60% of Americans surveyed for the report say they are uncomfortable with a provider relying on AI in their healthcare while 57% believe using AI to diagnose diseases and suggest treatments would harm the patient-provider relationship,” PYMNTS wrote last week.

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