Google’s Healthcare Strategy and the Role of AI

AMSTERDAM — Google is developing digital platforms, forming partnerships with agencies and healthcare providers, and promoting disease prevention, with generative AI models a key part of their efforts, said Karen DeSalvo, the tech giant’s chief health officer. She was speaking to Thomas Schulz, chief reporter at the German newspaper DER SPIEGEL, here at the HLTH Europe 2024 conference on June 17.

Karen DeSalvo

DeSalvo told the audience that despite the promise of innovative technologies, “I don’t want people to think that just by building a generative AI model, we’re going to cure health and disease.”

For her, “it is but one of the many tools that we’ll have in our toolbox,” alongside access to equitable healthcare and prevention through the provision of vaccines.

Technology Is Driving Discovery

Schulz told DeSalvo that a synergy appears to have developed between technology and discovery, with medical advancements being driven by the development of novel technologies.

DeSalvo agreed. It’s “palpable in the air,” she said, and reflects not only the ubiquity of tools such as generative AI models but also the speed at which technology is evolving.

“Technology allows us to democratize access to health for people all over the world,” she said. Recent advancements have meant “we can start to do that much more quickly and much more equitably.”

AI as Revolutionary as Penicillin

Schulz reminded DeSalvo that she has been quoted saying that AI in health could change health on a “planetary scale,” in the same way that the discovery of penicillin in 1928 had gone on to revolutionize healthcare.

Prior to the introduction of antibiotics, DeSalvo said physicians did not have a lot of tools at their disposal to tackle the leading cause of morbidity and mortality at the time: Infectious disease.

Today, she continued, the leading causes of morbidity and mortality are complicated and multifaceted. Some reasons are related to inactivity and poor diet, but genetics and the social determinants of health also come into play.

She said that when it comes to “addressing a health challenge in 2024, a single drug is not going to do it,” adding, “What you need is the capability of bringing together data from multiple disparate sources” to help develop a multifactorial prevention or care pathway that can also be personalized at the community and individual levels. This is where generative AI tools can play a strong role.

Alain Labrique, PhD, director of the Department of Digital Health and Innovation at the World Health Organization (WHO), agreed.

He told Medscape Medical News that “advanced computational tools, including large multimodal models, have an important role in helping researchers and policymakers make sense of large, complex datasets,” which need to be integrated into wider efforts to “help identify current or future risk areas.”

Not Just Tools and Technology

Google has two main areas of involvement in healthcare.

One is providing cloud services and platforms to governments, healthcare systems, and scientists to help them advance health.

The second is directly to individuals and includes devices such as fitness trackers, in addition to Google Search and YouTube.

DeSalvo said the COVID-19 pandemic underlined that “information is a determinant of health and, in a pandemic, getting out public health information is so critical,” especially in collaboration with partners such as the WHO.

Labrique told Medscape Medical News that the WHO has worked closely with a range of organizations to ensure people the world over have access to “timely, accurate, and reliable information to help them make the best decisions about their health for themselves and their families.”

This includes Google, he said, “who have welcomed the opportunity to support the global health community…in ensuring health messages and valid content reach people when and where they need this information.”

Labrique added that the WHO is exploring, researching, and validating technologies such as chatbots, virtual humans, social media platforms, and other channels to “meet people where they are in their health journeys.”

“We are also, through the Fides program, recruiting regional and local influencers to amplify trusted health content to millions of people around the world.”

Providing Information Carries Responsibilities

DeSalvo said that the pandemic also highlighted the responsibility that comes with providing access to information via internet searches.

“We learned people aren’t just wanting us to put out tools and technology, but they’re coming to us by the hundreds of millions every day, asking us questions, and so information is a really important part of what we feel responsible [for],” she said.

However, Labrique noted that, “[g]iven the tsunami of content that is created on a daily basis, now augmented by easily accessible and inexpensive generative AI tools, it is challenging for any company or platform, or national or global agency, to manage information quality.”

While efforts to address dis- and misinformation are crucial, he emphasized the importance of strengthening the capacity of individuals to “identify content trustworthiness and to scrutinize the source of health claims or information.”

The WHO and other organizations are therefore “working to develop repositories of trustworthy, up-to-date content,” as well as actively tackling false information online and developing “regulatory approaches to identify and flag harmful content that may be intentionally misleading.”

The Three Ps

DeSalvo emphasized that Google’s aim is not to deliver healthcare in the form of pharmaceuticals or devices. Instead, it is to empower healthcare providers and to curate an ecosystem of partnership, platforms, and prevention.

An example of prevention, she said, is to be able to direct an individual with type 2 diabetes to a video on YouTube by someone they can trust for information and encouragement on lifestyle changes, complimenting the information they receive from their physician.

Partnership is exemplified in the work Google is doing with the UK National Health Service to develop an AI-driven augmented image reader for mammography.

These images, she explained, normally need to be read by two clinicians before a report can be written and made available. Now, when human resources are lacking, Google’s augmented reader can provide the first reading to get the result “to the woman in a much shorter time period.”

This could also be done with chest x-rays to diagnose tuberculosis, she said.

Typically, these tools are open source, meaning they can be adapted free-of-charge by developers. Google is working with the Indian government on an application programming interface that will allow a chest x-ray reader to reach more clinicians on the front lines of care delivery.

Google has also developed other AI-driven tools, including an Android smartphone app that allows health volunteers in Kenya access the information they need to support expectant mothers.

Health Is More Than Drugs

Finally, DeSalvo discussed AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence program that predicts protein structures to examine, for example, antibody receptor binding.

This is also open source and is available to scientists to help them accelerate drug discovery in, for example, orphan diseases but has many other applications.

“Health is more than drugs,” DeSalvo said, noting that “one of the things I love about AlphaFold is that it’s also useful in thinking about things like more sustainable food sources and being able to improve access to food in general.”

She added that Google hopes people will take advantage of their open-source tools “because we’re not going to do it all ourselves.” Instead, the aim is for people to create ecosystems around the tools “to do more” than they could otherwise.

HLTH Europe is a large-scale healthcare industry event sponsored by many companies. The 2024 event was held in Amsterdam from June 17 to 21.

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