Generative AI has advanced rapidly in the last three years. These advances have sparked innovation in nearly every industry, especially healthcare. Its applications now include summarizing patient-doctor visits, scheduling appointments, extracting key patient data for authorizations, and assisting with diagnosis and treatment plans.
We are committed to offering technologies, tools, and resources to support healthier lives everywhere through bold and responsible AI use.
Better health is a team effort. Many of our biggest breakthroughs have come from working with top clinical, public health, and academic organizations. Together, we have detected breast cancer as accurately as radiologists, sequenced genomes faster, and screened hundreds of thousands of patients for diabetic retinopathy.
Healthcare’s digital transformation is just getting started, and we want to ensure that AI advances happen alongside the healthcare community, not just to it. With this in mind, let’s look at some of the most important developments we see as organizations start using AI.
1. AI Agents Are Transforming Healthcare Workflows
Across all industries, we are entering the era of AI agents powered by generative AI. These smart systems can access information, plan ahead, and take actions to achieve specific goals. This marks a big change from using AI as just a tool to seeing it as a partner.
AI agents help new workflows get adopted more easily by providing clear, practical benefits. They address common concerns. For example, they reduce manual work. This lets healthcare workers spend more time on patient care and worry less about added workload or uncertain outcomes.
In healthcare, AI agents help solve ongoing problems. They can reduce administrative work, which often limits time for patient care. Clinicians spend over a third of their week on tasks such as maintaining patient records, managing insurance forms, and handling documentation. AI agents can automate these jobs, such as scheduling, paperwork, and summarizing patient histories.
For example, Highmark Health, a leading healthcare organization in the US, created an application that enables Allegheny Health Network clinicians to analyze medical records for potential issues and to suggest clinical guidelines to improve submissions. This has reduced administrative work and improved patient experiences. Bayer is also working on an AI innovation platform that uses generative AI to help builders and developers build apps for radiologists, making image and data analysis more efficient.
By introducing these practical advantages, AI agents pave the way for new working methods that bolster organizational resilience, foster collaboration, and lead to measurable improvements in patient outcomes and care delivery.
2. AI-Powered Search Is Improving Access to Information
Healthcare providers face huge amounts of information from research papers and scattered patient records to new guidelines, and have little time to process it all and make good decisions. This problem is exacerbated by traditional keyword searches, which often struggle with complex medical terms and abbreviations.
Semantic search powered by clinical knowledge graphs helps healthcare workers quickly find the most relevant and accurate information across multiple sources, including electronic health records, scanned documents, and more. For example, AI-powered search can find mentions of diabetes in patient records and display related information, such as the latest treatments, prescribed medications, test results, and common related conditions. However, healthcare organizations will need ways to ensure AI-generated answers are accurate, such as grounding responses in reliable data or providing citations to trusted sources.
Many of our customers and partners are now combining AI-powered search with generative AI models, such as Google’s Gemini models. This lets clinicians ask questions about a patient’s record and get quick answers, making it easier to find exactly what they need. Meditech, a leader in electronic health records, has added advanced AI search and summarization for its Expanse EHR system. These new features give clinicians fast, easy access to complete patient information, so they can review past notes and confirm conditions like sepsis or surgical site infections in minutes rather than spending a long time on chart reviews.
3. AI Platforms Are Essential for AI Success
Generative AI is a powerful tool for increasing productivity and improving access to health information. To use AI successfully, organizations must invest in platforms that support easy deployment and management of generative AI solutions. This enables rapid progress from ideas to real outcomes.
Tools need tools to build, test, and monitor models, and to address challenges such as bias, errors, and changes in model performance.
Vertex AI
Vertex AI provides a single environment to address these challenges. It offers features for thorough evaluation, bias detection, grounding, and ongoing monitoring. This helps keep AI outputs reliable and accurate. It also makes it easier to add AI into healthcare workflows and routines.
Choosing the right platform helps organizations realize AI’s value quickly. Companies need models tested for bias, features that simplify adoption, and tools to connect AI to their data. Built-in governance, management, and security are also important.
Since AI depends on data quality, leaders should assess how well the platform’s ecosystem supports secure data foundations. The launch of Gemini 2.0 is a big step forward. It brings new ways to process various types of data, including clinical records, operational data, notes, images, audio, and video. Healthcare organizations should combine different types of data and use advanced analytics and AI solutions to get the most from these advances.
The Cloud Healthcare API, for instance, facilitates ingestion, storage, and management of important healthcare data types, including HL7v2, FHIR, DICOM, and unstructured text. Cloud Healthcare API also lets providers connect clinical and medical data to the full Google Cloud ecosystem, such as BigQuery and Vertex AI, to gain deeper insights through data analytics and AI.
By embracing AI responsibly and strategically and working together, the healthcare industry can deliver better patient care, improve efficiency, and drive innovation for a healthier future.
To learn more about the state of AI in healthcare, read our in-depth 2025 Healthcare Trends report.
Source: Healthcare’s AI transformation: Agents, search, and platforms
