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Google Aims To Make Patient Records More Searchable with Vertex AI Update
An upcoming enhancement to Vertex AI Search, Google's generative AI-powered enterprise search solution, will help medical providers sift through patient health data using natural language prompts.
Google announced the update, aimed at "healthcare and life sciences organizations," at the recent HLTH '23 medical tech conference as a panacea to the labor shortages and chronic overwork that afflict the medical industry today.
"Vertex AI Search features for healthcare and life science companies will help alleviate some of the administrative burdens and serve as an assistive technology to clinicians and other healthcare workers," the company said in its announcement last week.
The Vertex AI Search product helps users create natural-language search engines for their particular organization using their proprietary data. The healthcare-specific update would give care providers the ability to search through patients' electronic health records. The feature would tap into Google's Healthcare API, Healthcare Data Engine and its "search and intelligent summarization capabilities from its pilot product called Care Studio."
Regarding privacy and compliance, Google explained Vertex AI Search's protections this way:
Google Cloud's customers retain control over their data. In healthcare settings, access and use of patient data is protected through the implementation of Google Cloud's reliable infrastructure and secure data storage that support HIPAA compliance, along with each customer's security, privacy controls, and processes. In addition, Vertex AI Search, Healthcare Data Engine, and Healthcare API support HIPAA compliance. The new Vertex AI Search features for healthcare and life science companies will also support HIPAA compliance.
Users of the healthcare-tuned Vertex AI Search update can also tap into Google's Med-PaLM 2 large language model (LLM) that's been trained on medical information, the company said. Doing so, per Google, will help users "find the most relevant answers to complex medical questions both from world knowledge as well as within the patient's medical record, enabling them to make informed decisions faster and more efficiently."
More information on the healthcare related update to Vertex AI Search is available here.