Google Cloud Expands AI Partnerships to Streamline Healthcare Operations

The collaborations include AI tools for summarizing medical records and managing prior authorizations.

Google Cloud announced new artificial intelligence partnerships with healthcare organizations aimed at improving clinical workflows and administrative processes.

The collaborations include AI tools for summarizing medical records and managing prior authorizations.

According to a Google Cloud survey of 605 healthcare and life sciences leaders released Thursday, 44% of executives reported their organizations are actively using AI agents, with 34% employing ten or more agents. AI agents are advanced tools capable of autonomously planning and performing tasks within healthcare operations.

Hackensack Meridian Health has developed multiple AI agents using Google’s generative AI technology. One such agent summarizes patient medical records for clinicians. Since its launch in June, the note summarization tool has helped more than 1,200 clinicians produce over 17,000 summaries.

Sameer Sethi, SVP and chief AI officer at Hackensack Meridian Health, explained, “We all have been in situations where we go to our physician offices, and the physician is reading the screen while trying to understand and talk to you, right? We’re trying to reduce the time that the physician spends on screen looking at the patient's chart.”

The health system has also introduced two additional agents: one assists nurses in Neonatal Intensive Care Units by guiding best practices and policies, while another summarizes laboratory results to help primary care providers quickly draft patient notes.

In parallel, Google Cloud partnered with IKS Health to deploy an AI platform for managing prior authorization processes. The system features a documentation assistant that generates clinical notes, a coding agent that matches billing codes with documentation, and a tool that identifies when prior authorization may be required. This tool interfaces with payer systems to collect necessary administrative and clinical data for authorization requests. IKS Health emphasized that human oversight remains integral to ensure AI outputs meet clinical requirements.

The adoption of AI agents highlights a growing trend among healthcare providers to integrate advanced technologies to reduce administrative burdens and improve efficiency in patient care.

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