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Generative AI in health care: What does the new year hold?

December 27, 2023

Generative AI and the large language models like the ones behind ChatGPT are already being put to work across all areas of health care today. In a recent news release, Stacey Caywood, CEO of Wolters Kluwer Health, predicts that in the new year, generative AI will continue to lighten administrative burdens across health care organizations; sharpen clinicians’ decision-making skills; boost the efficiency of medical researchers; and aid the next generation of health care workers in ramping up their proficiency with smarter learning tools. (Walters Kluwer, 2023).

Read on for three recent, real-world examples of how generative AI is being used in health care today, and how these use cases might grow in 2024.

Google’s MedLM assists with complex note-taking and pre-clinical research

Earlier this month, Google unveiled MedLM, a collection of AI models fine-tuned for use in the health care industry and available to Google Cloud customers in the U.S. through the Vertex AI platform. The company explains that there are two models under MedLM: the first is larger and designed for complex tasks, while the second is a medium model, able to be fine-tuned and scaled across tasks. MedLM is built upon Med-PaLM 2, Google’s healthcare-tuned large language model that was released in April.

Google has been working with several partners, including HCA Healthcare and BenchSci, to test MedLM. HCA Healthcare has folded MedLM into its technology stack to assist physicians with their medical notes, generated in real-time from clinician-patient conversations, at four emergency department hospital sites. And BenchSci, a company that uses AI to hasten drug discovery, is integrating MedLM into its ASCEND platform to further improve the speed and quality of pre-clinical research and development.

In 2024, Google plans to release additional models based on the recently released Gemini, the company’s newest multimodal generative AI model. (Google, 2023)

AIs growing influence on dentistry

In November 2023, the Harvard School of Dental Medicine held its inaugural Global Symposium on AI and Dentistry. More than 400 dental practitioners, researchers, students, scientists, and policymakers gathered to discuss AIs growing influence on dentistry. Attendees presented research projects, many of which reported on real-world applications of generative AI.

For example, Francesca Dominici, director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, along with a team of researchers, is using AI to analyze satellite data, atmospheric chemistry models, and other factors to reveal which communities are most affected by increasingly frequent severe weather and wildfires. They hope to use this information to determine if these exposures, particularly when frequent, impact oral health.

Marinka Zitnik, assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School, leads a team that has developed a knowledge graph AI model called TxGNN that describes 17,000 diseases using all available clinical and biomedical data. Once trained, it will be able to predict how well any given therapeutic might effectively treat a patient’s unique disease, and even be able to recommend new uses for FDA-approved medications. (McAlpine, 2023)

Expediting the hiring process and answering insurance questions

Incredible Health, a career marketplace for nurses, recently implemented generative AI across its platform to streamline the hiring process. The new features include a “resume wizard,” a tool that generates an impactful resume via the Incredible Health mobile app in minutes and at no cost. The company also uses generative AI to instantly create customized messages to nurse candidates from health systems. The messages highlight important benefits, perks, and other differentiating factors that set the hiring company apart from others. In a recent Fierce Healthcare article, the company states that the new technology has driven a 20% increase in interview acceptance, dramatically speeding up the hiring process. (Landi, 2023)

Beyond expediting hiring processes, Caywood and others see generative AI as assisting in all administrative aspects of health care. When a new medication or a procedure is prescribed by a doctor, patients typically reach out to their health care insurer to understand their coverage, a process that can take days. Humana’s customer service agents can answer these questions quickly by using an AI-driven tool called Automation Co-Pilot. In a case study published in February, Humana estimated that by automating some of its administrative processes, the company has reduced the time workers spent dealing with documents by 684,000 hours per year. (Sundar, 2023)

Sources:

(2023, December 13). Google Cloud: Healthcare and Life Sciences. MedLM: generative AI fine-tuned for the healthcare industry. [Blog post]. https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/healthcare-life-sciences/introducing-medlm-for-the-healthcare-industry

(2023, December 20). Wolters Kluwer. Wolters Kluwer leaders predict accelerated AI transformation for healthcare in 2024. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231220108210/en/Wolters-Kluwer-leaders-predict-accelerated-AI-transformation-for-healthcare-in-2024

Landi, H et al. (2023, December 13). Fierce Healthcare. The latest generative AI efforts in healthcare: Incredible Health launches gen AI to speed up hiring process. https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/latest-generative-ai-efforts-healthcare-carbon-health-tempus-launch-tools-docs

McAlpine, K. (2023, November 27). Harvard School of Dental Medicine. From climate change to cavities, AI is changing oral health. https://hsdm.harvard.edu/news/climate-change-cavities-ai-changing-oral-health

Sundar, S. (2023, September 6). Business Insider. AI is helping the healthcare industry cut wait times for patients and save thousands of hours on data retrieval. Here’s how it could come to a doctor or hospital near you. https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-helping-health-insurers-doctors-with-administrative-tasks-2023-9