Google Cloud said it’s expanding its partnerships across the healthcare industry to bring the power of artificial intelligence to nurses, doctors and administrators who work on the front lines and behind the scenes.

Today at the Google Cloud Next 2025 event in Las Vegas, the company announced it’s teaming up with Highmark Health and Hackensack Meridian Health Inc., which represent major healthcare systems. Google also launched a collaboration with Seattle Children’s Hospital, which created Pathway Assistant, a generative AI-powered agent designed to improve clinician’s access to complex information and best practices to elevate patient care.

Healthcare in the United States faces major challenges including labor shortages, growing burnout among workers and increasingly complex patient needs. There is a need to bring high-quality evidence-based care day-to-day in a high-stress environment, and having access to the latest medical research and tools can turn the tide.

Highmark Health is a national blended health organization that provides health insurance coverage and personalized healthcare for simplified health and wellness management for customers across the U.S.

During a press conference, Richard Clarke, chief data and analytics officer at Highmark Health told reporters that the company is now using Google’s technology to bring generative AI tools to more than 14,000 of the company’s 40,000 employees. He added that the organization recently surpassed 1 million prompts.

“The advancement in multimodality has truly been fantastic for us,” Clarke said, adding that the advances with Imagen, Google’s text-to-image generating model, have specifically allowed the company to revisit solutions.

He mentioned that AI is changing so rapidly and advancement is so continuous that when there is a blocker sometimes a technology team needs only to wait a few weeks for a previously unavailable use case to become easily adopted. For example, now training videos are being driven by text-to-speech, AI is delivering a lot more general usability and has become a force multiplier across the organization.

“The number and amount of innovation has been tremendous,” Clarke said. “I think it’s not a day goes by that some staff member finds me to tell me a different way that they have decided to either upload a research article translated into an audio file or listen to it like a podcast on the way home.”

Sameer Sethi, senior vice president and chief AI officer of Hackensack Meridian Health, the largest and most comprehensive not-for-profit comprehensive healthcare system in New Jersey, said that the company is using AI to reduce strain on administrators and clinicians alike.

“Internally, we’re using Google’s platform to build various capabilities around clinical note summarization, ways by which our clinicians can shave off time,” Sethi said.

Innovations include creating a nurse agent that can quickly sift through large amounts of data to help alleviate burnout and a post-operative agent that follows up after procedures. The post-op agent can call patients, ask a series of questions, collect feedback, generate the next actions and then forward information to the aftercare team or schedule follow-up conversations based on the feedback provided.

“We have built various use cases where we are not just early detecting disease, but also creating signals within patient records that allow us to move a patient to a better care setting,” added Sethi.

Sethi noted that HMH is not just a healthcare network, but also an innovative organization with a research division and houses a school of medicine. “We can use natural language processing to scan through structured and unstructured data fairly quickly and come to a hypothesis a lot faster,” Sethi said.

Children’s hospital workers get AI assistant

Google Cloud is teaming up with Seattle Children’s Hospital, a nationally ranked top 10 hospital in the U.S., to create the Pathway Assistant, which will help healthcare workers get critical access to information faster to improve patient care.

When treating patients, critical medical expertise and research into evidence-based best practices often make the difference between a good outcome and a poor outcome in patient care. Knowing this, Seattle Children’s brought together dozens of healthcare providers and scholars to build a comprehensive clinical effectiveness program featuring the Clinical Standard Work Pathways, a documented approach to the management and treatment of particular conditions, including more than 70 diagnoses.

Since 2010, CSW pathways have been the evidence-based tool for diagnosing patient illnesses and improving health outcomes. This method has become the foundation of 40 similar programs affiliated with other children’s hospitals around the country.

Built with the current state-of-the-art Google Gemini models on Google Cloud, Pathways Assistant can rapidly synthesize information from CSWs by integrating text, images and the latest medical literature to help medical professionals stay informed and make decisions, the company said. According to Google, the generative AI assistant can research and develop a diagnosis and research plan within seconds compared to 15 minutes when done by hand.

“The Pathway Assistant is like having a trusted consultant at your side,” said Darren Migita, M.D., medical director of clinical effectiveness, at Seattle Children’s. “It has immediate access to the collective wisdom of all the medical professionals who authored the pathways.”

Google and Seattle Children’s developed the agent in collaboration with more than 50 healthcare providers. The companies revealed that initial pilots of the AI have shown strong indications of potential to improve patient outcomes by reducing provider workloads by allowing doctors more time and mental bandwidth treating patients.

“The sheer volume and complexity of healthcare guidelines present a significant challenge for physicians, often making crucial information difficult to access at the point of care,” said Aashima Gupta, global director of healthcare strategy and solutions at Google Cloud. “This project addresses this very issue and it’s a testament to the power of targeted AI solutions.”

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