AI in Healthcare: Google Cloud Adds to Industry Platforms With Robust Set of Skills, Connectors

Google Cloud extended its industry AI strategy with a healthcare suite that reaches into a now-familiar playbook and includes a range of pre-built AI skills, connectors to a range of widely trusted third-party systems, and a powerful roster of ecosystem partners.

Gemini for Healthcare aims to help providers, health plans, and payers overcome the common healthcare scenario of data that’s fragmented across patient records, insurance coverage, and clinical evidence records that don’t work together.

One notable difference from its previous government, financial, and legal suites: the company isn’t touting customers as design partners, but it nonetheless shared a roster of customers and prospects weighing in on the value of the AI-powered software. Those customers indicated an eagerness to begin testing how Gemini for Healthcare can make the business of healthcare, as well as patient care, operate better.

“Gemini for Healthcare serves as a foundation for our unified architecture of reusable AI agents, enabling us to deliver new capabilities and productivity gains significantly faster than traditional development cycles,” said Prem Somasundaram, Chief Information Officer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. He noted that the insurer is focused on agentic AI to drive automation and operational transformation.

Michael Schlosser, MD and Chief Clinical Officer at HCA Healthcare, emphasized potential clinical impact of the new Gemini for Healthcare. “We’re exploring how Gemini can interpret and synthesize complex patient information from multiple electronic health record systems and care settings, connecting data from different sources to give clinicians a more complete and cohesive understanding of a patient’s medical history.”

Platform Overview and Included Skills

Google Cloud said the new Gemini for Healthcare is an extension of the Gemini agent that was introduced last month. Gemini agent is an always-on resource that manages work delegated by employees. It can plan steps, use organizational context, tap the best AI models, and orchestrate a group of agents to deliver finished work across clinical, operational, and administrative workflows. Each agent operates with a distinct identity and inherits users’ role-based permissions.

Inclusion of skills tailored to the processes and roles of a specific industry is a primary value add of industry suites including Gemini for Healthcare. In the case of Google Cloud’s latest deliverable, these reusable instructions and context support common tasks among providers and payers. Skills specific to payers include:

• Synthesizing electronic health records (EHR) and external records to separate resolved problems from active issues, list patient allergies, and flag medication discrepancies. For clinicians, this overcomes the need to assemble history from disconnected systems.
• Preparing patient charts ahead of a scheduled visit or procedure, flagging interval events, current medications, and outstanding clearances, labs, or consents in advance.
• Extracting chart data into an audit-ready packet to streamline clinical authorization

Skills specific to payers include:

• Checking incoming requests against a health plan’s medical policies and organizing findings for reviewers, with findings traceable to the submitted documentation and coverage policy. This shifts the focus to professional judgment by reviewers.
• Parsing plan benefit details to estimate out-of-pocket costs, track deductibles, and verify in-network status, giving member services staff a step-by-step breakdown based on the member’s actual plan documents.

System-of-Record Connections

Connectors to the systems already used in provider and payer organizations are critical to ensuring AI automation can be applied to existing workflows. In the case of Gemini for Healthcare, Google Cloud rolled out an expansive set of connectors linking Gemini to EHR, claims, care management, and administrative systems that are prevalent today. The categories of connectors, as well as specific providers and systems, include:

• EHRs and clinical data: Epic, Oracle Health, InterSystems, Verato, Keragon
• Eligibility, claims, and pricing: Optum, TriZetto, GoodRx, Infinitus Relay
• Terminology and coding: IMO Health, ICD-10 Codes, RxNorm Drug Vocabulary
• Coverage and provider reference: CMS Coverage, NPPES NPI Registry
• Evidence-based guidelines: Optum EvidenceVue, BMJ Digital Health
• Clinical and operational workflows: Salesforce, Suki, UiPath, Synthpop Careflow, Alteryx
• Enterprise productivity and collaboration: Sana from Workday, ServiceNow, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace
• Security and compliance: Cyera Dataport

In addition to the collaboration required to make these connectors operate optimally for customers, Google Cloud also outlined partnerships with healthcare systems integrators to deploy the platform; these include Accenture, Cognizant, Deloitte, HCLTech, KPMG, Wipro, and many others.

Gemini for Healthcare is available in preview in the U.S. today.