What's Google's MedLM? Tech giant adopts latest Med-PaLM 2 models for doctors, nurses

Besides releasing Duet AI for Developers, Google Cloud has announced the general availability of MedLM, a family of foundation models fine-tuned for healthcare industry use cases, on Vertex AI.

Google started its research into medically-tuned LLMs last year with the first Med-PaLM. Now, the models of MedLM are built on Med-PaLM 2, the largest, most capable language model from Google Research yet, and are designed to be flexible and scalable to meet the needs of different healthcare organizations.

“Improving healthcare and medicine are among the most promising use cases for artificial intelligence,” says the tech giant in the official announcement.

MedLM is available in two sizes: a large model and a medium model. The large model is designed for complex tasks such as summarizing conversations and searching through medications, while the medium model is fine-tuned to be used across a variety of tasks.

Available exclusively for United States users (for now), it can answer questions posed by healthcare professionals and generate draft summaries of existing medical documentation.

Google Cloud is also working with Accenture and Deloitte to help healthcare organizations use MedLM to improve patient access, experience, and outcomes. 

These partnerships will focus on automating manual processes, improving provider search, and enhancing clinical decision-making.