Seattle Children’s is set to launch an AI chatbot to help clinicians with treatment decisions.
The pediatric health system partnered with Google to build the tool using its Gemini generative AI platform. Seattle Children’s has tested the solution with about 40 of its physicians.
“You can query it and say, ‘I have a patient with this, this, this and this,’ and it will actually tell you instantaneously how to take care of that patient,” Zafar Chaudry, MD, senior vice president and chief digital, AI and information officer of Seattle Children’s, told Becker’s during the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas. “So that’s super cool. Because you can accelerate how you’re able to take care of an acutely ill patient.”
The large language model is digesting Seattle Children’s care pathways that are used by other providers across the industry but are in PDF form. The tool took about six months to develop, just underwent final testing and is set to be released soon to the clinic.
“You have to test it to make sure it’s not hallucinating in any way, shape or form. It’s all about: How do you absorb massive amounts of information and summarize that information so action can be taken?” Dr. Chaudry explained. “It’s not that a clinician doesn’t know how to do their job, but it’s more about: How do you amalgamate so much data for them so they can have a more informed decision-making process?”
Seattle Children’s will have to train providers on how best to prompt the AI. The chatbot is internal so will not share data with Google.
In the past, physicians working on a research project would enlist medical students to find information and enter it into spreadsheets, Dr. Chaudry said. Now AI can do all that.
“I’m doing the same thing with my IT contracts, hundreds and hundreds of pages of IT contracts,” he said. “If I wanted an answer to what was happening with this particular vendor, what did we agree to, I’d have a person go to those PDFs, read those PDFs, and come back to me with the answer hopefully three to five days later. Well, we don’t have to do that.”
Seattle Children’s has already been consolidating its data and analytics functions with Google, so Gemini was a natural fit.
“Secondly, Google’s openness to work with us, do lots of proof of concepts, to prove their technology, they’ve been a true partner,” Dr. Chaudry said. “Whereas when we looked at other areas perhaps to go down there wasn’t as much keenness to be a partner.”
He said Google also has a healthcare team that “understands what we’re talking about” and a large language model focused on medicine, which “we found to be quite good, and their iteration speed is really fast.”
“This is what’s going to accelerate us doing our job, especially when we’re not going to get more resources,” Dr. Chaudry said. “Burnout is real, clinically or nonclinically. People are tired, so I don’t want to overburden people anymore. This will take some pressure off.”
