2025-04-10
Vendor notebook: Google and IBM make moves on clinical and business AI
IBM and Google announced separate initiatives this week that use artificial intelligence in new ways to, respectively, expand enterprise intelligence services and surface clinical information at the point of care. Also, a new partnership seeks to improve social determinants of health program efficacy, reduce costs and deliver better outcomes for healthcare payers, providers, payviders, employers, patients and other healthcare stakeholders.New agentic AI at Seattle Children'sGoogle Cloud is partnering with Seattle Children's Hospital to launch an AI agent called Pathway Assistant that streamlines access to critical, evidence-based information within the hospital's clinical effectiveness program. Seattle Children's Clinical Standard Pathways tool can help providers improve patient outcomes for more than 70 diagnoses. The partners, including more than 50 of the Seattle health system's providers, built the clinical decision-making tool with Google's Gemini machine learning models on Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform to enhance clinical decisions and reduce provider workload burdens.The AI agent quickly synthesizes text, images and the latest medical literature at the point of care, which could take up to 15 minutes if done manually. It's a significant step forward in delivering quality care, according to Dr. Clara Lin, the hospital's vice president and chief medical information officer. "We are committed to offering our doctors and other healthcare providers the most cutting-edge tools to enhance their decision-making," Lin said in a statement. The tool also reduces provider workloads and extends the "collective wisdom of all the medical professionals who authored the pathways" to providers using the AI consultant, said Dr. Darren Migita, Seattle Children's medical director of clinical effectiveness. Google said that the use of the HIPAA-compliant tool will be measured against qualitative and quantitative measures developed to assess both patient and physician outcomes and that the hospital will retain control over its data.IBM expands enterprise intelligence servicesThe tech giant announced the acquisition of New York-based Hakkoda, a data and AI consultancy that IBM Consulting says will help its clients build an integrated enterprise data infrastructure that can fuel AI-driven business processes. The addition of the specialized data platform expertise expands IBM's data transformation services portfolio, which could speed up clients' data modernization efforts. "With Hakkoda's data expertise, deep technology partnerships and asset-centric delivery model, IBM will be even better positioned to deliver value faster to clients as they transform with AI," Mohamad Ali, senior vice president and head of IBM Consulting, said in a statement.Hakkoda is also a Snowflake partner, adding core and advanced certifications to IBM's portfolio and an advanced-tier partner of Amazon Web Services.A new SDOH accountability frameworkTo optimize member health outcomes and better inform social risk management decisions, Socially Determined, Mathematica and MedeAnalytics are collaborating to develop a data-driven, actuarially validated framework that assesses the ROI of decisions around social determinants of health.Texas-based MedeAnalytics, the healthcare enterprise data enrichment and analytics software-as-a-service platform, called the partnership a first-of-its-kind Social Risk Insights program that will set new standards in SDOH intervention evaluation and implementation.It's an opportunity to empower healthcare organizations to improve patient outcomes "while simultaneously reducing costs and enabling measurable impact for the communities they serve," Steve Grieco, MedeAnalytics CEO, said in a statement Tuesday. The partners will use the company's Health Fabric platform, which combines strategic advisory services and AI, to measure SDOH impacts to deliver actionable insights. They said they would focus on providing robust financial impact assessments that could create a more complete picture of member populations and result in better resource optimization. "The healthcare system is increasingly accountable for outcomes and disease progression – 80% of which are driven by social factors," said Trenor Williams, CEO of Socially Determined, in the announcement. "By embedding our social risk intelligence into a financial impact framework validated by Mathematica and deployed through MedeAnalytics, we enable healthcare organizations to directly measure and manage the ROI of social interventions at scale.""This team of data science, healthcare delivery and policy experts will provide evidence-based recommendations to improve the well-being of our friends, family and neighbors served by health payers and providers," added Joshua Baker, managing director of Mathematica.Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.Email: [email protected] IT News is a HIMSS Media publication. Enterprise Taxonomy: Machine learningPopulation and Public HealthSocial determinants of healthQuality CareClinical decision supportAnalyticsAICybersecurity and PrivacySecurityProcess ImprovementClinical engineeringEmerging TechnologiesCareData and InformationProcessTechnology
