Tech conglomerate Google is all about making an impact and seems to have a larger affinity towards life science and healthcare. Recently, Google Research launched a new medical chatbot called AMIE specialising in expert-level differential diagnosis. The chatbot creation was carried out by research leads Alan Karthikesalingam and Vivek Natarajan. Unlike the big tech’s previous AI models, Med-PaLM 2, which focuses on medical summaries or answering questions, AMIE serves as a diagnostic tool, generating differential diagnoses.

AMIE is built on Google’s PaLM and trained on datasets containing medical conclusions, summaries, and actual clinical conversations.

Last December, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT struggled to find real-life use cases, Google ventured into using LLMs for healthcare, making a tangible impact on human lives. This led to the development of Med-PaLM, an open-source LLM specifically designed for medical use. 

Since then, the team released expanded versions, namely Med-PaLM-2, Med-PaLM-M, and MedLM, which are being used by different organisations to build AI-powered healthcare solutions. Currently, Med-PaLM-2 is undergoing testing at reputable healthcare institutions, including the Mayo Clinic. 

Not long ago, Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs released the latest version of AlphaFold. The AlphaFold-latest can predict the structures from nearly all molecules in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). The AI model has already found a variety of real-life applications including finding vaccines for malaria, liver cancer, COVID-19, delivering gene therapy and more. 

Pre Gen AI Boom

Even before Med-PaLM, Google, unlike its big tech counterparts, had a significant focus on democratising healthcare with technology. The company introduced a deep learning model to detect diabetic retinopathy called Automated Retinal Disease Assessment (ARDA) in 2016. The tool is still being actively employed in numerous eye clinics across India.

In an earlier interview with Forbes, Dr Karen DeSalvo, chief health officer, said, “Google is a life company…not a health company. One of the primary goals of the company is to help billions of people around the world become healthier in an equitable manner… giving every single person an opportunity to have the highest quality of health.”

Alphabet is currently focused on four key areas in healthcare, namely, wearables, health records, health-related AI, and the ambitious aim of prolonging human life.

From 2019 to 2021, a tech giant invested around $1.7 billion in healthcare projects, marking one of the highest investments by a tech company in the healthcare sector as of 2022. Since 2020, Alphabet and its affiliated venture funds have taken the lead in 25 health-related investment rounds, totaling over $1.6 billion. Overall, Alphabet and its affiliated funds have led 76 investment rounds for healthcare and biotech companies, with a combined value surpassing $4 billion. 

In the last two years, the company collaborated with Mayo Clinic to better radiation therapy with AI. The company also participated in various initiatives to support pandemic response, streamline clinical workflows, and ensure secure health data management. Examples include creating a web tool with New York State for essential services access and developing a mental health wellness app with Cooper University Health Care for frontline workers.

It also partnered with Ascension to introduce Care Studio for improved patient information management, while Highmark Health integrated Verily’s digital tools for chronic condition management through an expanded Google Cloud collaboration.

Another important collaboration is between HCA Healthcare and Google Cloud, focusing on accelerating the former’s digital transformation and developing a sophisticated data analytics platform for enhanced operational models and insights, using Google Cloud’s healthcare data resources.

Leading the AI in Healthcare Race 

It is not like other big techs like Microsoft, AWS, Apple are not tapping into healthcare. However, it was Google who started the “AI and healthcare” conversation last year. 

Since then, all the big techs have decided to take this area seriously. For example,  AWS has collaborated with prominent healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer, Amgen, Moderna to enhance drug discovery, manufacturing, and AI integration. Apple also plans to introduce additional health detection features in its next series of watches, addressing issues like hypertension and apnea. 

Oracle is also adding generative AI solutions in its cloud-based electronic health record (EHR) capabilities that include enhancing patient care, optimising clinical expertise, increasing cost efficiency, and reducing provider burnout. 

Moreover, OpenAI also got into this growing space by recently partnering with wearable technology company WHOOP to create a personalised health and fitness coach driven by its LLM GPT-4. 

However, another interesting this to note here is that most major tech companies depend on partners for research and subsequently apply findings to projects, Google does both in-house. No other conglomerate appears to have invested as extensively in developing LLMs specifically for healthcare.

According to Vivek Natarajan, AI researcher at Google and one of the main brains behind AMIE, the tech giant’s goal is to be helpful to people and health is a big part of people’s lives. 

“AI is going to be a big part of healthcare; with Google’s expertise in AI, there is no better place for medical AI research. At the same time, we also deeply care about going beyond research to translational and having an impact on people’s lives,” Natarajan told AIM. 

Read more: Meet the Genius behind Med-PaLM 2