AI roundup: News from Mayo Clinic, Google Cloud and more

This week Abridge announced that its artificial intelligence listening documentation platform will be distributed more broadly at Mayo Clinic to improve patient care following the health system's evaluation. The use of Google's and other's machine learning models is also accelerating in areas like drug repurposing and infectious disease tracking and response with announcements from the non-profit Every Cure and Switchboard, MD.Providing nurses with ambient AIFollowing a rigorous clinical note quality assessment evaluation of Abridge's AI ambient documentation workflow for nurses developed in partnership with Mayo Clinic and electronic health record vendor Epic Systems, the company announced its new enterprise-wide agreement on Tuesday. Through the partnership expansion, the company will begin connecting approximately 2,000 Mayo Clinic clinicians serving more than one million patients annually with the AI-powered clinical documentation software."At Mayo Clinic, we are committed to leveraging innovative AI platforms to improve both clinicians' well-being and provide high-quality, patient-centered care," Dr. Amy Williams, the health system's executive dean of practice, said in a statement. "This collaboration aims to enhance our continuous innovation and empowers our clinicians to focus on what matters most – our patients."Expanded access to ambient AI eases nurses' administrative burdens, "ultimately enabling both physicians and nurses to dedicate more attention to focused patient care,” added Dr. Shiv Rao, CEO and founder of Abridge.He credited Mayo Clinic’s ethos for adopting high-quality AI innovations to make headway in healthcare by leveraging generative AI. He previously told Healthcare IT News that genAI can help recruit the next generation to work in the healthcare industry by simplifying difficult and labor-intensive processes.The clinic is an AI trailblazer, using large language models to improve many aspects of healthcare delivery, such as using real-world data to advance precision medicine.Using LLMS for off-label use predictionsEvery Cure announced Monday that it will use Google LLM for Google Cloud's infrastructure and AI technologies, including Gemini 2.0, to accelerate life-saving discoveries and improve patient outcomes for diseases lacking effective therapiesThe non-profit said in a statement that more than 300 million people globally are suffering from diseases without available treatments and that drug repurposing can address this unmet need and help improve treatment affordability.The computational biology platform Matrix will use Google tools to examine established safety profiles and analyze extensive data to validate new uses for existing drugs.The company said the collaboration will focus on three use cases:Improving the accuracy of AI-driven drug repurposing predictions.Validating predictions through accelerated preclinical testing and optimized clinical trials.Ensuring global adoption of validated treatments."We are so excited about the potential for this collaboration with Google Cloud to rapidly scale the impact that Every Cure can make on patients' lives," Dr. David Fajgenbaum, Every Cure co-founder and president, said in a statement. "We created Every Cure to treat patients with existing drugs as quickly as possible and this collaboration supercharges our ability to do this."Detecting infectious diseases with NLP Switchboard, MD launched ThreatAware, which uses natural language processing and machine learning models to to identify and prioritize potential disease-specific cases.Developed with support from the Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response and Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, the system helps to identify potential infectious disease risks early in order to empower clinicians to intervene promptly with at-risk patients."Having a flexible and well-integrated system in place is essential for managing emerging health threats," Dr. Larry J. Anderson, professor at Emory University School of Medicine and former director of the Centers for Disease Control's Division of Viral Diseases in the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in a statement. "In the case of new outbreaks, symptoms and data points can evolve rapidly, and being able to adapt and analyze those changes quickly is critical to making informed decisions and supporting effective responses." Switchboard said that AI does much more than identify and classify emerging infectious disease risks by enabling healthcare organizations to quickly scale their response and better collaborate with public health agencies -- a major opportunity for the emerging technology.Developing models for infectious diseases requires numerous considerations, according to Yuanda Zhu, Switchboard's director of engineering."The complexity of medical conditions, the need for expertly labeled training data, and the wide variation in how patients describe potential symptoms all require careful consideration," she said in a statement. "By collaborating with a wide range of clinicians from across the globe, who helped train and validate ThreatAware, we've created a system that adapts to real-world scenarios and delivers reliable, actionable insights."Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.Email: [email protected] IT News is a HIMSS Media publication. Enterprise Taxonomy: Population and Public HealthAnalyticsAIPredictive analyticsWorkflowEmerging TechnologiesMachine learningCareData and InformationProcessTechnology