In a recent blog post, Google announced the public preview of two new fully-managed AI tools: Healthcare Natural Language API and AutoML Entity Extraction for Healthcare. Both tools can assist healthcare professionals in reviewing and analyzing medical documents in a repeatable, scalable way. By delivering these new tools, the public cloud vendor hopes to reduce workforce burnout and increase healthcare productivity, both in the back-office and in clinical practice.
The new Healthcare Natural Language API uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help medical staff like doctors to extract the most pertinent information they need to know about their patients they treat from the stacks of medical records related to each individual. The API has been trained on thousands of medical documents to extract the information medical staff needs to know - using machine learning to classify clinically important attributes based on the surrounding context in medical records.
In addition to the Healthcare Natural Language API, Google also launched a second complimentary service called AutoML Entity Extraction for Healthcare, which is a low-code tool for healthcare professionals with minimal coding skills. Moreover, they can use the platform to create their own Healthcare Natural Language models that are customized to derive even more specialized knowledge from medical records – which may help them better recognize more important details in medical records, such as gene mutations and socio-economic factors.
Google is not the only public cloud vendor providing natural language processing services in the healthcare domain. AWS, for instance, already launched a service back in 2018 called Amazon Comprehend Medical.
Lian Jye Su, a principal analyst at ABI Research, stated in a tweet:
#AI implementation in #healthcare is likely to take a leap forward with Healthcare Natural Language API and #AutoML Entity Extraction for Healthcare from #Google.
Also, Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told InfoQ:
2020 is the year of verticalization of the Cloud. Something Google started actually at Google next 2019. Language always has specific jargon, and AI drives enterprises to the clouds.. so after tackling languages, it is now the turn to enable industry-specific jargon.
Currently, according to the blog post, customers can try out the Healthcare Natural Language API, which is free-of-charge for the next 30 days, until December 10th, 2020. Furthermore, customers can get started with the public preview of AutoML Entity Extraction for Healthcare and leverage the available step-by-step guide and documentation website.