A recent interview with a top Google executive shed light on AI advances and new developments with Google AI products.

Aashima Gupta, the head of healthcare for Google Cloud, discussed several new developments involving AI. Some of those developments include:

• Ability to understand images by Vertex AI Search. Information exists in many different forms, and healthcare information is no different. In some ways, healthcare is more image dependent than other types of information, due to so many types of diagnostic imaging formats available. With multimodal search available, clinicians can more easily and quickly find and upload appropriate images for clinical documentation and other uses. This can save time for clinicians. Said Gupta, "Last year, we said Search was ‘semantic’, meaning it knows what people mean when they say ‘diabetes’ or ‘A1C’ — it knows clinical concepts and how they’re related. Now we’re taking that and applying that to forms in an exam room that have different pictures. So our results are much more accurate and helpful."
• Sound search is coming. In addition to image search, users should soon be able to search for sounds, as well as videos.
• Development of agentic AI. This is different from generative AI, which is task-based. Agentic AI is more of a planner/organizer that can analyze workflows, for example. In one scenario, agentic AI will be able to analyze a revenue cycle to look for variations in payer types, market, particular CPT codes, etc.

Google is focused on providing the platform and tools needed to improve integrated coordination and management. For organizations building a first-party agent, Google Cloud provides use of Google’s Gemini large language models, search functionality based on clinical knowledge and an orchestration layer.

No longer is healthcare lagging behind in technology use and advances with so much going on with AI.