Google Cloud on January 9 went on to announce its bold thought for healthcare for the year ahead.
It is without any doubt that the company has gone on to make a name for itself in the healthcare gamut in the last few years. Significantly, due to the recent buzz that has been centered around AI, Google Cloud has gone on to be at the forefront of innovation.
It is well to be noted that 2023 happened to be one of the best years for Google Cloud, as the organization went on to deploy years’ worth of investments as well as research by way of a variety of varied products. Google Cloud has been pretty hefty on research in healthcare, considering that it happens to be a very vast field and that there is no dearth of opportunities regardless of the geography. For healthcare, amidst the most notable products happened to be Vertex AI Search as well as the company’s latest release, MedLM, which is a family of foundation models specially built with healthcare sector use cases in consideration.
Vertex AI Search happened to be made a splash in 2023 as one of the first services within the industry that could go on to empower organizations to make optimal use of the power of generative AI search in terms of healthcare applications. In particular, the technology goes on to give the users the capacity to search as well as glean insights from a wide spectrum of clinically effective sources, like clinical notes, electronic health records, as well as other documents. Significant customers that range from Hackensack Meridian Health as well as Highmark Health to Meditech and the Mayo Clinic happen to be already making use of this technology.
MedLM happened to be yet another groundbreaking release by the company last year, building on the previous edits of Med-PaLM and years of deep dive within this space. The idea behind MedLM is to empower firms with the power of AI throughout a wide spectrum of applications as well as tasks. For example, Augmedix, which goes on to provide ground-breaking ambient dictation tech for clinicians. Augmedix’s core tech makes use of Google Cloud’s MedLM on Vertex AI, apart from natural language processing, so as to translate data into drafts of medical notes. Yet another key example happens to be the life sciences space, where organizations such as BenchSci are making use of MedLM so as to make their drug research, discovery, and development processes more trustworthy and exact.
All this was in 2023
The Global Director of Healthcare Strategy & Solutions, Google Cloud, Aashima Gupta, goes on to thoughtfully explain that 2023 happened to be just the start of this new era, and 2024 is going to see a phenomenal progress as the technology goes on to shift from experimentation and trials to actual, real-time world use-cases so as to help organizations get better insights through their data, reduce the administrative burdens for clinicians, as well as palpably help enterprises be more successful as well as efficient.
She goes on to tactfully explains the pathway ahead which predominantly comprises of three major categories: Short-term optimization, which goes on to refer to leveraging AI so as to help ease the urgent administrative burdens as well as cognitive burdens which happened to be faced by health systems as well as practitioners; Long-term transformation, which is all about using the power of this new tech so as to create more effective as well as efficient clinical workflows, get huge insights from existing data and help interoperability throughout data sources; and conclusively, profound learning, which relate to the fact that the overall ecosystem such as Google, healthcare organizations as well as policymakers, will go on to learn how to actually team AI with the intricacies and nuances of care delivery as well as healthcare outcomes.
Gupta so poignantly remarks that finally, this by and large, a cutting-edge tech is going to push forward a new comprehension when it comes to both health as well as healthcare.
Nonetheless, although the wider outlook when it comes to this technology happens to be optimistic, the work does not look easy by any means. The fact is that the level of hard work, commitment, as well as investment needed to have breakthroughs in this field is indeed immense. Apart from this, the competition to invent is indeed profound. Technology companies throughout the spectrum happen to be swiftly speeding up their endeavours to have a major share of the pie. Let us look at the example of Microsoft, which has gone on to rapidly push up its offerings when it comes to the healthcare artificial intelligence spectrum recently, specifically due to the release of Azure Health Bot. Just like what Microsoft did, even Amazon has gone on to invest pretty heavily in order to empower organizations by means of deploying healthcare analytics as well as machine learning tools.
Besides the fierce competition when it comes to the software and platform side, hardware also happens to be on the top of mind for these companies, as these intricate platforms as well as services go on to require immensely high computing power. It is well to be noted that NVIDIA went on to witness an exponential growth in 2023 for this very reason, given the fact that its industry-leading GPUs that have gone on to show an unmatched resilience and promise. There happen to be certain other contenders, like AMD as well as even Google, due to its efforts with Tensor, which are indeed making valiant strides within this landscape.
There is no doubt at all that 2024 is indeed seen as one of the most humongous years when it comes to this technology and even for the healthcare industry in general. Within this arena, the road ahead for Google happens to be bold, ambitious, as well as very promising, given the fact that it has put years of research, funding, as well as resources to making sure that these efforts go on to find their true place.
