Seattle Children’s Hospital has partnered with Google Cloud to bring an AI agent to its providers’ fingertips.
The new agent will help physicians and clinicians easily access information from the system’s clinical pathways at the point of care to ensure a high standard of care for all patients, the organizations said.
Seattle Children’s clinical standard work pathways bring providers the latest evidence-based practices in medicine for more than 70 disease states. The pathways lay out a documented approach to manage and treat a population or condition based on published evidence and expert opinion.
The system launched the pathways program in 2010, and the guidelines are routinely updated by cohorts of leading clinicians in the relevant specialties. The best practice guidelines can now be more easily accessed by physicians through the Pathways Assistant, created in collaboration with Google Cloud.
In an article published in PubMed Central in 2016, Seattle Children’s found that using its clinical pathways stemmed the cost of patient care and the length of stay in the hospital. Research showed that compared with care delivered before the pathways became available, patient care decreased by $155 per month ($246 to $64) and reduced length of stay per month by half (0.05 days per month to 0.02 days per month).
The AI-enabled Pathways Assistant was built with Google Gemini models and Vertex AI by Google. An initial pilot of more than 50 providers at Seattle Children’s showed that use of the assistant reduced mental load for providers.
"The Pathway Assistant is like having a trusted consultant at your side," Darren Migita, M.D., medical director of clinical effectiveness at Seattle Children's, said in a statement. "It has immediate access to the collective wisdom of all the medical professionals who authored the pathways."
Seattle Children’s will assess the AI assistant’s impact on clinicians and patient care as it is rolled out to the facility.
“The sheer volume and complexity of healthcare guidelines present a significant challenge for physicians, often making crucial information difficult to access at the point of care," Aashima Gupta, global director of healthcare strategy and solutions at Google Cloud, said in a statement. "This project addresses this very issue and it's a testament to the power of targeted AI solutions. By streamlining access to critical information, Seattle Children's aims to alleviate the administrative burden, empowering physicians to dedicate more focused and meaningful time to patient interactions, ultimately leading to improved health outcomes."