Google partners with NHA to deploy AI to digitise medical records

Technology giant Google on Tuesday announced $400,000 in funding in India to support collaborations that will use MedGemma, a collection of open-source, medically tuned vision-language foundation models, to improve the efficiency of healthcare providers in the country.

 

“As a first step, Ajna Lens will work with experts from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to build models that will support India-specific use cases in dermatology and OPD (out-patient department) triaging. The resulting models will contribute to India’s digital public infrastructure, and their outcomes will be made accessible to the ecosystem,” Google said.

 

Apart from this, Google will also work with the National Health Authority (NHA) to deploy its advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to convert medical records into an internationally acceptable, machine-readable format, the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards.

 

“This shift is expected to help patients understand their medical information better, reduce documentation burden on patients and hospitals, and inform better data-driven policy decisions for India’s public healthcare strategy,” the company said.

 

Google is also working to bring more than 400,000 NHA-registered health facilities, such as hospitals, clinics, and diagnostic labs, onto Google Maps and Search, allowing people to easily “find and navigate to their nearest health centres with the most updated official information”, it said.

 

The philanthropic arm of the company, Google.org, also announced a funding of $8 million for four centres of excellence at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, the Indian Institute of Technologies at Kanpur, Ropar and Madras.