Apollo Hospitals, Google Cloud to deliver gen AI-powered healthcare service

Appolo Hospitals on Wednesday (September 6) announced a new collaboration with Google Cloud to offer secured digital healthcare solutions to the masses in India.

Due to the untimely Covid-19 outbreak in early 2020, governments in most countries including India, had to enforce lockdowns for almost one and a half years.

Thanks to the internet, most people in urban areas were able to access information on healthcare, and with smartphone apps, they were able to have one-on-one virtual meetings with doctors for consultations.

However, most of the rural populace was deprived of such services. But, things are about to change for good with the advent of generative Artificial Intelligence (gen AI).

Using Google Cloud's latest Vertex AI and gen AI, Apollo Hospitals has developed a new Clinical Intelligence Engine (CIE), to deliver safe and secure healthcare service across the country.

With Google Clouds' large language models (LLMs), CIE uses the vast data collected from Apollo Hospitals to create proprietary solutions. This will greatly assist doctors to quickly identify the next best action for patients during consultations.

"Access to timely and accurate health information is a real challenge in India, and our partnership with Google Cloud is poised to address it through various collaborations. Apollo's expertise, data, and hospital network will help shape a new era of precision and empathy in clinical decision-making with medical grade generative AI, and AskApollo embodies the fusion of technology and compassion to revolutionize patient care," said Shobana Kamineni, Vice Chairperson, Apollo Hospitals.

With real-world clinical data points gathered over 40 years and CIE, Apollo Hospitals runs the popular AskApollo service. It helps patients navigate through Apollo Hospitals' healthcare services such as exploring standard health check-ups, and lab tests, booking doctor appointments to seek consultations, and more with less hassle.

Going further, Apollo Hospitals plans to use more advanced Med-Pathways Language Model (PaLM) 2, a LLM developed by Google that is trained on medical knowledge, and can answer medical questions and generate genuine clinical text summaries.

“Generative AI has the transformative power to bring conversational medicine to clinicians and patients alike. Our work with Apollo Hospitals will improve accessibility in healthcare, support clinicians and care teams, and drive better patient engagement—ultimately benefiting millions of Indians," said Thomas Kurian, CEO, of Google Cloud.

In order to curb misinformation, Google is joining forces with Apollo Hospitals to deliver authoritative and authentic health-related information in search results.

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