Google has been betting big on generative AI. One of the key focus areas is healthcare where Google wants AI to play a critical role. In a blog post, the company has detailed how generative AI will impact health care. According to Aashima Gupta, global director for Healthcare Strategy & Solutions, Google Cloud, said that in 2023 generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) surprised, challenged and inspired the healthcare industry.“In 2024, we’ll see this technology move from experimenting and trial to real-world use cases, especially in areas that reduce administrative burdens, help clinicians easily find information, assist healthcare call centre agents, and ultimately help organisations run more efficiently,” Gupta said.
Generative AI can also ease the cognitive burden on caregivers by assisting with clinical documentation, easily finding relevant information, and by helping radiologists, pathologists, and lab workers in going through large sets of results, said Gupta. “Make no mistake, humans are more central to the process than ever, but with gen AI, they have a powerful new tool to do more satisfying work with less tedium,” she added.
Gupta believes that AI will help in amassing and reconfiguring existing data in new ways. “There are hundreds of millions of electronic health records, diagnostics reports and PDFs describing patient and hospital conditions that can, with the powerful computing of gen AI, generate new insights and unveil patterns,” she said.
Furthermore, according to Gupta, what will be more important is what gen AI will be able to do for a healthcare organisation when it combines not only data from different sources, but also information from entirely different modes, like imaging scans, lab results, and patient interviews. “Bringing these different pieces of information and data together can enable gen AI-powered solutions to more accurately and safely answer medical questions. It’s just the start of where this richer understanding is headed,” she noted in the blog post.