Google LLC is rolling out a new version of its Vertex AI Search service optimized for healthcare and life sciences organizations.

The company detailed the offering this morning at HLTH 2023, a healthcare technology conference taking place in Las Vegas.

Vertex AI Search first debuted earlier this year under the name Gen App Builder. It leverages large language models to let users browse their companies’ internal data troves with natural language queries. A physician, for example, could input the request “fetch the patient’s electronic health record” instead of manually searching for the file in question.

In its responses, Vertex AI Search cites the sources from which it retrieves information. Furthermore, Google provides features that make it possible to integrate the service with a company’s internally developed software. Organizations can use Vertex AI Search to power applications such as customer support chatbots.

The healthcare-optimized version of Vertex AI Search that debuted today is currently in public preview. According to Google, it’s designed to help staffers at healthcare organizations more quickly find the data they need for their work. 

“Healthcare workers often struggle to find insights in clinical data across structured and unstructured data stores,” Google executives Aashima Gupta and Lisa O’Malley wrote in a blog post. “Unstructured data such as patient notes and scanned documents, is particularly hard to search, and it’s easy to miss critical information. Moreover, you need expert clinical knowledge to know what data is even pertinent.”

What sets the new offering apart from the standard edition of Vertex AI Search is that it’s integrated with three existing industry-specific Google products. Those products are Care Studio, Healthcare Data Engine and Cloud Healthcare API.

Care Studio is essentially a version of Google Search that has been optimized for the healthcare sector. According to the Alphabet Inc., the offering allows medical professionals to retrieve information from patient health records using natural language search queries. Care Studio displays the most important information at the top and also shows related results.

The second technology that powers the new version of Vertex AI Search is Healthcare Data Engine. Introduced in 2021, it’s a Google Cloud service designed to address the fact that healthcare organizations’ information is often scattered across multiple systems in different file formats. The fragmented way in which this information is stored can make it difficult for medical professionals to find specific records. 

With Healthcare Data Engine, organizations can combine medical information from multiple sources into a single dataset. The service is capable of ingesting electronic health records, clinical notes and a variety of other files. Organizing medical records in a single dataset makes them easier to access and analyze.  

The third highlight of the new healthcare-specific Vertex AI Search release is an integration with Cloud Healthcare API. This is another Google Cloud offering that can be used to move healthcare information between a healthcare organization’s different systems. It eases the task of making information from backend databases available to the frontend applications used by medical professionals.

“With these new features, healthcare organizations will now have Google-quality gen AI search that is medically tuned, allowing users to find accurate clinical information much more efficiently, and to search a broad spectrum of data from clinical sources,” Gupta and O’Malley wrote. “Life-science organizations can use these features to enhance scientific communications and streamline processes.”

Image: Google