Seattle Children's Hospital, Google Cloud launch AI agent to support healthcare providers' clinical decision-making
Google Cloud has teamed up with Seattle Children's hospital, a nationally ranked top 10 children's hospital in the United States, to create Pathway Assistant, an AI-powered agent that elevates patient care by improving healthcare providers'' access to complex information and the latest, evidence-based best practices needed to treat patients.
Google noted that the U.S. healthcare system faces critical challenges—a growing provider shortage, coupled with increasingly complex patient needs. To deliver consistently high-quality, evidence-based care, healthcare providers must be able to rapidly access and apply the latest medical research. Recognizing this, Seattle Children's leveraged the expertise of dozens of healthcare providers and scholars to review current medical literature and develop a comprehensive Clinical Effectiveness program featuring Clinical Standard Pathways for more than 70 diagnoses. Since 2010, CSW pathways have been a proven clinical tool to improve patient outcomes, and now there are nearly 40 similar programs affiliated with free-standing children's hospitals around the country.
Google said that through a groundbreaking collaboration with Google Cloud, CSW pathways will now be available at healthcare providers' fingertips through the launch of 'Pathway Assistant,' an AI agent designed to streamline access to critical, evidence-based information within the CSWs.
Built with Google's Gemini models on Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform, Pathway Assistant rapidly synthesizes information from CSWs—including text, images and the latest medical literature—to help healthcare providers retrieve what is needed to make informed, accurate and potentially life-saving decisions. Pathways Assistant can find and share information in seconds in contrast to up to 15 minutes if done manually.
[Read more: The future of AI in pharmacy]
"We are committed to offering our doctors and other healthcare providers the most cutting-edge tools to enhance their decision-making," said Clara Lin, MD, vice president and chief medical information officer, Seattle Children's. "This AI agent represents a significant step forward in achieving that goal, enabling our team to leverage the full potential of CSWs and deliver the highest quality care to the patients we serve."
Developed in collaboration with more than 50 healthcare providers at Seattle Children's, initial pilots of Pathway Assistant have shown strong potential to improve patient outcomes by reducing provider workloads and enabling providers to spend more time and mental bandwidth treating patients. "The Pathway Assistant is like having a trusted consultant at your side," said Darren Migita, MD, medical director of clinical effectiveness, Seattle Children's. "It has immediate access to the collective wisdom of all the medical professionals who authored the pathways."
Pathway Assistant also is expected to promote greater compliance with standard care processes, ensuring that all patients experience the same high level of care. Initial impacts of this tool will be measured against a suite of qualitative and quantitative measures developed to assess both patient and physician outcomes.
“The sheer volume and complexity of healthcare guidelines present a significant challenge for physicians, often making crucial information difficult to access at the point of care," said Aashima Gupta, global director, healthcare strategy and solutions, Google Cloud. "This project addresses this very issue and it's a testament to the power of targeted AI solutions. By streamlining access to critical information, Seattle Children's aims to alleviate the administrative burden, empowering physicians to dedicate more focused and meaningful time to patient interactions, ultimately leading to improved health outcomes."
[Read more: What healthcare technology trends will play out in 2025?]
The company noted that Google Cloud's customers retain control over their data. In healthcare settings, access and use of patient and member data is protected through the implementation of Google Cloud's reliable infrastructure and secure data storage that support HIPAA compliance, along with each customer's security, privacy controls and processes, the company said.