Google, Microsoft announce new AI capabilities for healthcare

Last week, Google and Microsoft unveiled new, powerful AI capabilities targeting healthcare and life science companies. Here is the breakdown of what the two tech giants have prepared:

Google

Google Cloud announced new capabilities in Vertex AI Search for healthcare and life sciences organizations that enable medically-tuned generative AI (gen AI) powered search on a broad spectrum of data, including clinical sources, such as FHIR data and clinical notes.

• It will do this by integrating with Google Cloud's Healthcare API and Healthcare Data Engine, as well as with Google Health's search and intelligent summarization capabilities from its pilot product called Care Studio.
• Vertex AI Search tuned for healthcare and life sciences will help solve acute and growing problems of workforce shortages, provider burnout and administrative burden.
• The new features build on Vertex AI Search's current ability to easily set up question-answering and conversational search applications powered by foundation models, including the ability to ground outputs of gen AI to the enterprise's data. They will give customers the ability to find accurate clinical information more efficiently and ask questions about the patient record.
• Google Cloud customers will be able to benefit from using Vertex AI Search features for healthcare and life sciences alongside Med-PaLM 2, Google's medically-tuned large language model.
• Google Cloud's customers retain control over their data, supporting HIPAA compliance.

Google Cloud customers can sign up now for early access to Vertex AI Search features for healthcare and life sciences to try out and share feedback.

Microsoft

Microsoft introduced new data and AI solutions as part of its Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare offering to help healthcare organizations unlock insights and improve patient and clinician experiences.

• The tech giant introduced the first healthcare industry-specific data solutions for Microsoft Fabric, its end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools that organizations need to unlock the potential of their data and lay the foundation for the era of AI.
• Now available in preview, the healthcare data solutions in Fabric eliminate the costly, time-consuming process of stitching together a complex set of disconnected, multimodal health data sources — text, images, video, etc. — and provide a secure and governed way for organizations to access, analyze and visualize data-driven insights across their organization.
• Microsoft Fabric gives healthcare organizations the ability to combine data from previously siloed sources across their organization, such as EHRs, Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), labs systems, claims systems and medical devices. The solution brings structured, unstructured, imaging and medical device data into the Fabric data lake with open data standards using FHIR, DICOM and MedTech services.
• It also offers a multimodal data foundation that allows them to build standardized, scalable solutions that help accelerate the process of uncovering impactful clinical and operational insights and ultimately drive better patient care.
• There are also standard capabilities like Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) analytics to enable clinical research and patient outreach analytics and help provide more personalized engagement with patients.
• Plus, there is a new de-identification service to allow organizations to de-identify clinical data, keeping patient-protected health information (PHI) private by using machine learning models to extract, redact or surrogate identifiers while unlocking insights from unstructured data, such as doctor's notes, medical documents and clinical trial studies.
• In addition, through healthcare-specific pre-built classification rules, labels and data glossaries in Microsoft Purview (preview), healthcare organizations can govern, protect and manage their entire data estate.
• Early adopters of Microsoft Fabric include Chicago's Northwestern Medicine, Arthur Health in partnership with Quisitive for the Ontario Workers Network (OWN), and Singapore's largest network of public healthcare institutions - SingHealth.

New healthcare capabilities within Azure AI services:

• Azure AI Health Insights - a cognitive service that provides prebuilt models that perform analysis and provide inferences that can be reviewed and used by clinicians and researchers to facilitate patient care during important healthcare scenarios. The company announced three new models in the preview — including patient timeline, clinical report simplification, and radiology insights.
• The new preview capability in Azure AI Health Bot that brings generative AI to healthcare chatbots and virtual assistants.
• Text Analytics for Health - an Azure AI Language service extracting and labeling medical data to identify meaningful insights.

Finally, Microsoft announced the general availability of Nunace's DAX Copilot.

The context

Healthcare data continues to grow rapidly, and organizations are struggling to keep up with higher volume, greater variety and increased velocity.

According to the World Economic Forum, hospitals produce 50 petabytes of siloed data per year — 97% of which goes unused, leaving many valuable insights locked away.

Putting all this data to good use is the key to unlocking clinical and operational breakthroughs that can make a meaningful difference in the lives of patients and their healthcare journey. And in the new era of AI, the importance of data continues to grow as organizations realize that without a solid data strategy, they are only scratching the surface of what's possible with AI.