Google Cloud to bring generative AI to healthcare
Google Cloud is making Med-PaLM 2 available to a select group of Google Cloud customers to explore use cases and share feedback. This is the first time a medically-tuned large language model is being made available on the cloud for healthcare organizations to explore, according to the company.
Med-PaLM 2 harnesses the power of Google’s LLMs, aligned to the medical domain to answer medical questions more accurately and safely.
As a result, Med-PaLM 2 was the first LLM to perform at an “expert” test-taker level performance on the MedQA dataset of US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE)-style questions, reaching more than 85% accuracy, and it was the first AI system to reach a passing score on the MedMCQA dataset comprising Indian AIIMS and NEET medical examination questions, scoring 72.3%.
Industry-tailored LLMs like Med-PaLM 2 are part of a burgeoning family of generative AI technologies that have the potential to significantly enhance healthcare experiences. According to a blog post by Google Cloud, the company is “looking forward to working with our customers to understand how Med-PaLM 2 might be used to facilitate rich, informative discussions, answer complex medical questions, and find insights in complicated and unstructured medical texts. They might also explore its utility to help draft short- and long-form responses and summarize documentation and insights from internal data sets and bodies of scientific knowledge.”
Since last year, Google Cloud has been researching and evaluating Med-PaLM and Med-PaLM 2, assessing it against multiple criteria—including scientific consensus, medical reasoning, knowledge recall, bias, and likelihood of possible harm—which were evaluated by clinicians and non-clinicians from a range of backgrounds and countries.
Med-PaLM 2's performance on medical exam-style questions is a promising development, but it is necessary to learn how this can be harnessed to benefit healthcare workers, researchers, administrators, and patients, according to the company.
In building Med-PaLM 2, the company focused on safety, equity, and evaluations of unfair bias. The limited access for select Google Cloud customers will be an important step in furthering these efforts, bringing in additional expertise across the healthcare and life sciences ecosystem.
In addition to this development, Google is also announcing a new AI-enabled Claims Acceleration Suite, designed to streamline processes for health insurance prior authorization and claims processing. The Claims Acceleration Suite helps both providers of insurance plans and healthcare to create operational efficiencies and reduce administrative burdens and costs by converting unstructured data into structured data that help experts make faster decisions and improve access to timely patient care.
For more information about this news, visit https://cloud.google.com.