the health strategy — review
for in-person health
and digital health strategy
Joaquim Cardoso MSc.
Senior Research and Strategy Officer (CRSO),
Chief Editor and Senior Advisor
January 17, 2023
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
Google’s medical AI chatbot, Med-PaLM 2, is currently undergoing testing at hospitals, including the Mayo Clinic research hospital, since April.
- Med-PaLM 2 is a variant of PaLM 2, Google’s language model that powers their AI tool, Bard, which is designed to answer medical information-related questions.
- Google believes Med-PaLM 2 can be particularly helpful in countries with limited access to doctors, addressing healthcare disparities.
Med-PaLM 2 was trained on a curated set of medical expert demonstrations, making it better suited for healthcare conversations compared to more generalized chatbots like Bard, Bing, and ChatGPT.
- Google publicly disclosed research showing that Med-PaLM 2 still has some accuracy issues common to large language models.
- Physicians found inaccuracies and irrelevant information in its answers.
- Despite the accuracy concerns, Med-PaLM 2 performed as well as actual doctors in many other metrics, such as showing evidence of reasoning, providing consensus-supported answers, and comprehending information correctly.
Customers testing Med-PaLM 2 will have control over their data, which will be encrypted, ensuring privacy and Google won’t have access to it.
- Google’s senior research director, Greg Corrado, admits that Med-PaLM 2 is still in early stages and may not be suitable for his family’s healthcare journey.
- However, he believes it significantly expands the areas where AI can be beneficial in healthcare by tenfold.
TO READ THE FULL VERSION
The Verge
By Wes Davis
Jul 8, 2023,
