Gemini for healthcare, Google Cloud’s AI agent for health systems and insurers
Credit: Google Cloud
Google Cloud has launched Gemini for healthcare, an AI agent that works across the record, billing and insurance systems hospitals and health insurers already use. It is available in preview in the US from Tuesday, Google Cloud said. Launch customers include Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Hartford HealthCare, HCA Healthcare, Highmark Health, Northwell Health, Optum and Stanford School of Medicine.
“By working directly alongside our healthcare customers, we’ve built a platform that resolves chronic bottlenecks so that the industry can put its focus entirely back on human health,” said Thomas Kurian, chief executive of Google Cloud.
The product sits on top of Google’s general Gemini agent. It pulls data from health records, billing platforms, clinical guidelines and US Medicare datasets. Then it plans and carries out tasks with several steps, within set guardrails and with human oversight, Google says.
Google Cloud has already built versions of Gemini for government services, financial services and legal work. The launch also follows a quarter in which Google Cloud revenue doubled to $30.7bn.
Reads the chart, cannot change it
Gemini for healthcare launches with five ready-made skills, Fortune reported. They cover tasks such as summarising medical records, preparing for appointments and checking a patient’s insurance benefits. Teams can also build their own.
The agent reads records from Epic and Oracle Health but does not write back to them, so a doctor or nurse still makes any changes. Support for NextGen Healthcare is due in the coming months. Each answer cites its source so staff can check it.
Customers can choose models from Google, Anthropic and OpenAI. Simple admin tasks go to fast, cheaper models, while complex clinical work goes to stronger reasoning models. Google says it never uses customer data to train its foundation models. Organisations pay per seat or as they go.
Paperwork and insurance fights
Clinicians lose nearly 28 hours a week to documentation and admin, Google said, citing its own study with The Harris Poll. The American Hospital Association puts admin costs at 25% to 35% of US health spending.
John D’Angelo, chief executive of Northwell Health, described the cost of fighting insurers to Fortune’s Catherina Gioino.
“I have like 400 employees whose sole job is fighting the insurance denials, and we overturn over 90% of them, but that’s a big labor cost,” D’Angelo told Fortune.
In a demo for Fortune, the system compared an outside specialist’s report with a patient’s Epic chart in 35 seconds. It flagged new lab results and an allergy the chart had missed. A clinician then decides whether to update the chart.
“It shouldn’t replace the doctor or the nurse, but it should give the doctor or the nurse back to the patient,” D’Angelo said.
In August, TNW reported that AI scribes were getting drug names and diagnoses wrong in NHS records.
Partners pile in
Partners announced their own links to the agent later the same day. GoodRx brings prescription prices and savings into Gemini, and Google Cloud is the first platform for its integration. UiPath lets teams start its automations and agents from Gemini, in preview for joint customers.
Verato matches records that belong to the same patient across systems. InterSystems connects Gemini to its FHIR data server and says it powers more than one billion health records. Altimetrik, AuxoAI and Egen will help customers build and deploy it.
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