Generative AI: The Next Frontier in Healthcare

The healthcare industry is facing a number of challenges, including high costs and poor patient experiences. Despite the vast amount of data collected from electronic health records (EHRs), claims, clinical trials, and connected devices, insights that drive better patient outcomes and efficiencies are scarce.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to help mitigate some of these issues. It has numerous transformative use cases across the healthcare value chain, including pharma, healthcare providers, and payers. Technology is capable of simulating rare diseases, generating new drug molecules, or even creating personalized medical treatments.

Market.us forecasts that the global generative AI in healthcare market will reach a valuation of USD 17.2 billion by 2032.

The report cites the following factors as driving the growth of the market:

• The increasing prevalence of chronic diseases: Chronic diseases are a major challenge to healthcare systems around the world. Generative AI can be used to develop new treatments for chronic diseases, as well as to personalize existing treatments.

• The rising demand for personalized medicine: Personalized medicine is a rapidly growing field. Generative AI can be used to develop personalized medical treatments that are tailored to the individual patient's genetic makeup and medical history.

• The increasing availability of data: The amount of data available in healthcare is growing rapidly. This data can be used to train generative AI models that can generate new insights into diseases and treatments.

  
  

The report notes that "the technology is still in its early stages, but it is already being used to develop new treatments for diseases, personalize existing treatments, and generate new insights into diseases."

The Med-PALM by Google

One example of generative AI use in healthcare is the Med-PALM model developed by Google. The model was presented at the April 2023 conference Check Up from Google Health.

Med-PALM and Med-PALM 2 are AI models based on the PALM neural network from Google Research. The models were trained on datasets containing questions from doctors' exams and massive dataset of medical literature.

Med-PaLM can answer a wide range of medical questions, including those about diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. It can also generate summaries of medical research papers and provide insights into complex medical topics. Med-PaLM is still under development, but it has the potential to revolutionize healthcare. It could be used to provide patients with personalized medical advice, to help doctors diagnose and treat diseases, and to develop new drugs and treatments. It can be used to create personalized educational materials for patients, outline their medical conditions and treatment options, and translate medical information to enable outreach.

The format of interaction with the model is a chatbot similar to ChatGPT.

Med-PALM and Med-PALM 2 are the first AI models that were able to pass the US Medical License Exam (USMLE) with scores of 67.2% and 85.4%, respectively.

All said, the future of generative AI in healthcare is full of possibilities, but it is important to be aware of the risks associated with this technology. Generative AI models can be biased or inaccurate.Healthcare organizations should implement strong governance practices to mitigate these risks.

References:

• Med-PaLM: A Large Language Model for Medical Question Answering: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.02873
• Sharing Google's Med-PaLM 2 medical large language model, or LLM: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/healthcare-life-sciences/sharing-google-med-palm-2-medical-large-language-model
• Google latest health AI research updates: https://blog.google/technology/health/ai-llm-medpalm-research-thecheckup.