Google Goes Deeper Into Health Care With Gemini Artificial Intelligence Tool

Artificial intelligence already integrated within health care. How has it surprised you in the way that is already improved our access to health? This is such an exciting time in health care because A.I. has reached this inflection point where it is now capable of being an adjunct and assistance to augmenting the work that doctors and nurses and other people in health care already need to do, and extending the reach of clinical practice to to improve access to care. Sometimes I’m very jealous of doctors that are just starting out in the field because they have this new

tool in their toolbox that they’re going to get to use across their career in the way that when penicillin was discovered, it was a new tool in the toolbox. So we’re already seeing that is helpful in improving speed to diagnosis, for example, where we’re doing some work with Apollo hospitals in India to extend the ability of that health system to diagnose cancers earlier like lung and breast cancer so they can reach people who normally wouldn’t have that kind of access to care. So thinking about how it’s a wonderful augment to the work that needs to

happen in clinical practice and makes that practice more efficient but also gives people more access to it’s a really exciting opportunity. Can you articulate some of the

ways in which Google in particular is able to use its own innovations, its own products that it’s already brought into the field to be able to help with health? We talked a lot about these at the checkup, which is an annual event where we can mark the progress of how things are going and how we’re working with partners, but also how we’re directly helping consumers. I’ll give you an

example of how we’re building it directly into some of our products and to to work with consumers. So on Fitbit, where people already get advice about steps or sleep or nutrition, we’re creating what’s called a personal large language model. So we’re creating a new AI that’s personalized to you so that it knows with your consent, knows your sleep and your steps and sort of other characteristics about your day and your exercise. It can give you personal coaching that gives you those nudges that are going to matter most to you because it’s reflective of what your

experience has. I’m personally very excited about this. Also, I’m a person who’s a runner and it’s really it would be so exciting to have that personal coach built into our watch devices like Fitbit over time, and pretty soon we’re going to allow people to start to opt in to help us build and mature that that personal element. That’s almost like a prevention, ensuring that people remain healthy ahead of becoming or aware of certain illnesses that they have got. Tell us a little bit about how your well, if you are concerned or indeed limits you’re putting

on the ability of an individual to sort of self-diagnose. There is perhaps almost too much information for us nowadays. We, you know, weren’t early days of understanding how AI is going to be most helpful. I think we’re seeing with our partners ways that they’re starting to implement it on the front lines to do things that are helpful to the clinical experience that people have. And we’re also thinking about how it’s useful on our surfaces like search and YouTube going forward. Some of the ways that we were already using it on YouTube, for example, is to

it’s a tool called allowed, which can dub videos and allow for language translation in a much more seamless way so that creators can extend the reach of the work they’re doing. We’re working with a partner at Harvard, the Mass, the Mass Program General Hospital, and working to see that videos that they’ve created to to address first aid, for example, are more easily translated and can can reach more people to be helpful. So what we’re learning is that the tools have a lot of usefulness, not only directly for consumers, but especially for those partners that want

to use it to to extend the reach of the services that that they’re already providing. We all have a lot to learn. I mean, I think we we we believe in this adage at Google that health moves at the speed of trust. And so we want to be very intentional and thoughtful as we’re working with our partners to build tools that are going to help consumers directly or things that are going to help them in the clinical environment or advancing other forms of the health care system trust. And also, though, for you has to be

well, there’s got to be an advantage from a revenue perspective. What are the benefits to Google to providing this sort of technology? Well, you know, we’re in very early days of of developing the technology, and we’re doing that by learning from our partners about what are the key things that they want to solve for and how can we be helpful with them as they’re as they’re working to improve their own businesses, their own hospital systems, working for for discovery of new cures for diseases? A great example is a partnership that we talked about at the

checkup. We’re working with HCA, which is the biggest hospital company in the U.S. and they identified a problem on the front lines where nurses at the end of a shift need to summarize all the care and the issues that were delivered for the patient during that prior shift and hand that off to the next nurse who’s going to be caring for that person in the bed. So this nurse handoff, I’ve seen it when I was practicing in the hospital. It’s a very complicated effort where they have to. Go into the computer and the records and

assemble all the information. And that takes time, sometimes away from them being at the bedside, which is where a lot of the nurses just want to be. So that’s a great example of how when we work with partners to learn about the promise of this technology to be helpful in the front lines, they identified nurse handoffs and we can work with them on seeing that this tool improves efficiency, but also allows the nurses to be more present and to deliver that care. The human component to health care with AI as an assisted assistive tool for

them. How quickly do you think you can charge, therefore, given the early innings? Oh, we’re just we’re still in early days of trying to understand how the tools are going to be helpful to all parts of the health ecosystem. And I mentioned some of the ways that we’re building it into some of our own tools to make that experience better for the people who are already using things like YouTube or have access to to our tools like Fitbit.