The Mayo Clinic Is Bringing Google’s AI Chatbot to Medical Facilities

More AI chatbot here PaLM 2 uses, here in medicine.

The Mayo Clinic Is Bringing Google’s AI Chatbot to Medical Facilities in Extremetech

The healthcare industry is one of the riskiest arenas to which AI can be introduced, but Google is confident Med-PaLM 2 will rise to the challenge.

By Adrianna Nine July 11, 2023

Google is confidently making a foray into the healthcare industry with Med-PaLM 2, a variation of its PaLM 2 language model. Through a partnership with The Mayo Clinic, the AI chatbot will soon assist clinicians and their administrative staff with time-consuming, hands-off tasks like health record retrieval and routine medical questions. 

The Mayo Clinic has been testing Med-PaLM 2 since April, according to a report published Monday by The Wall Street Journal. PaLM 2, Google’s latest iteration of the original PaLM, powers many AI tools, from Bard (a ChatGPT-like generative bot) to Gecko (a mini PaLM 2 designed to operate locally on the user’s smartphone). Med-PaLM 2 is reportedly different in that it isn’t meant to serve a variety of industries. Instead, it’s trained on medical licensing exams, providing it with what Google believes to be sufficient knowledge to handle patient and staff requests appropriately. 

There isn’t much public information regarding what Med-PaLM 2 will do. While we’ve reached out to The Mayo Clinic for more details, the WSJ reports that Med-PaLM 2 will be able to “hold conversations on healthcare issues” and “generate responses to medical questions.” It’ll also help with data processing by retrieving documents and, according to Google itself, “[finding] insights in complicated and unstructured medical texts.”  ...