How Artificial Intelligence Improves Health for Everyone Worldwide

2023-10-04

Google's Chief Health Officer believes that AI has the potential to change people's health on a global scale, like the discovery of penicillin. If developed boldly and responsibly, AI will become a powerful force in promoting health equity and improving health outcomes for everyone, everywhere.

AI has already enabled people to tackle major social challenges - from advancing medical research to improving the accuracy and efficiency of clinical processes and health information quality. At Google, we are deploying AI in our products to help people in their everyday moments. This may look like someone searching for mental health resources, using Google Lens to find a match for a skin condition, finding useful health information about arrhythmia or our most accurate results, or enabling heart rate tracking on Fitbit. We have teams taking their research from the lab to the clinic, democratizing access to health for some of the world's most serious diseases by applying AI to breast and colon cancer screening and chest X-ray imaging.

These solutions are important and valuable for consumers and caregivers, and the next generation of AI and large language models (LLMs) represents a huge shift with the potential and possibility to bring high-quality, affordable care and health. Commitment. Fairness and inclusion. This will be a key topic that my team and I will discuss with partners and peers at one of the industry's largest conferences, HLTH, in Las Vegas next week. As we think about how this wave of AI is changing health, it is important to remember these three perspectives: developing AI responsibly, collaborating with others, and remembering that AI is one of many tools for improving health.

Developing AI responsibly - especially when it comes to health

We are in the early stages of understanding the full potential of these new AI technologies. Without responsible development and deployment, AI could exacerbate existing inequalities. We are working to ensure that these technologies do not leave anyone behind and that advances in AI are used boldly and responsibly. All of this is done in collaboration with the health ecosystem and the people it serves.

Our AI principles provide us with a framework to ensure fair, safe, and effective delivery of AI applications. Most importantly, they remind us to adhere to one of the oldest principles in medicine: first, do no harm. Any other approach is unacceptable.

Collaborating with others

In order to ensure that AI accompanies healthcare rather than serves it, we seek close collaboration with hospitals, governments, universities, healthcare providers, and consumers to identify solutions that have high impact and global assistance. And to do so safely, responsibly, and fairly, to help improve health outcomes for everyone.

Some foundational examples of these efforts include our collaboration with the National Academy of Medicine on medical AI behavior guidelines, and our work on guiding principles in the Health AI Alliance to ensure that AI tools provide high-quality care and empower users. Increase trust between each other and meet healthcare needs. Through Google Cloud, we are partnering with Bayer Pharmaceuticals, HCA Healthcare, MEDITECH, and other healthcare institutions to explore how our HIPAA-compliant Med-PaLM 2 large language models can improve administrative and operational processes. How to help create. This includes reducing time-consuming tasks, such as searching for information and documents, which often take up valuable time for researchers and practitioners.

Using AI as one of many tools to improve health

While AI is becoming one of the most powerful tools in a doctor's bag, it is important to remember that the best AI models are just a technology, and health is human. Health requires human judgment and contextual understanding - such as the ability of caregivers to read between the lines or understand the health burdens associated with living in a certain zip code. AI will not replace doctors and other members of the healthcare team, but doctors who use AI will replace those who do not. Medical professionals should view AI as a powerful assistive technology that will help them make better decisions, save time, gain more insights, improve diagnostic accuracy, and enhance their ability to provide quality care and improve health.

At Google, we want to play a bold and responsible role in unlocking AI for health so that we can collaborate with the industry and consumers to create appropriate AI-driven tools, products, and services. After all, health is something we do together as a society to create conditions for everyone to live a healthy life.