By Aashima Gupta, Global Director, Global Healthcare Solutions, Google Cloud
2024 proved to be a transformative year for the Healthcare industry as generative AI technologies continued to advance. At Google Cloud, we saw many of our healthcare customers move beyond AI experiments and deploy generative AI (gen AI) in production.
And, in a recent study, we found 62 per cent of healthcare and life sciences execs have already moved gen AI use cases into production, with 74 per cent seeing ROI from their gen AI investments on at least one use case.
This couldn’t come at a more critical time for the healthcare industry. In a recent poll, healthcare workers reported that administrative burdens are contributing to rising costs, worker burnout, staffing shortages, and reducing quality of care for patients.
In 2025, gen AI technologies will play an increasingly pivotal role in helping healthcare providers streamline a variety of administrative tasks, enabling them to focus on delivering quality care. There are five core trends at the heart of this adoption: multimodal AI, AI agents, patient experience, intuitive search, and risk mitigation.
Let’s review each trend and explore their potential impact on the industry.
Multimodal AI: A comprehensive view of patient health
In 2025, we’ll see a surge in new multimodal AI solutions. Multimodal AI refers to models that are capable of processing and integrating information from diverse sources – such as images, videos, and text. This capability is especially important in healthcare, where nearly 90 per cent of healthcare data is in image form – including as x-rays, scans, or photos.
To give healthcare professionals a comprehensive understanding of a patient’s health, AI models must combine data from medical images, patient history and genetic information. With richer data inputs, multimodal AI can help providers in making more accurate diagnoses, designing more personalized treatment plans, and ultimately improving patient outcomes.
For example, Bayer is developing an AI Innovation Platform to support healthcare developers building AI-enabled apps to assist radiologists. By streamlining image analysis and automating tasks, this platform aims to improve diagnostic efficiency, reduce burnout, and ultimately enhance patient care.
AI agents: Balancing autonomy and oversight
In 2025, we’ll see AI agents increasingly deployed at scale. An AI system is “agentic” when it has the capability to take actions autonomously, allowing organisations to automate various processes.
For healthcare providers, it’s critical to identify which workflows are appropriate for agentic AI and which require human oversight. While clinical workflows will continue to need human supervision, many back-office processes – such as scheduling and paperwork – can be automated with gen AI.
This will be a trend in 2025 that will ease the administrative burden on healthcare staff.
Highmark Health is using gen AI to streamline prior authorization and claims processing. By acting as an intelligent assistant, its AI solution can pre-populate forms, analyse requests for potential issues, and suggest relevant clinical guidelines to strengthen submissions. This leads to faster approvals and improved patient care.
Similarly, gen AI can assist with claims processing by verifying eligibility, reviewing medical necessity, and calculating payments, ultimately increasing efficiency and accuracy in healthcare operations.
Omni-channel: Improving the patient experience
In 2025, we’ll see more healthcare providers adopt omni-channel strategies to support all the different ways patients interact with the healthcare system. It’s important to provide patients with personalised care across both digital and physical channels, such as websites, mobile apps, call centres, as well as in-person visits.
At Google Cloud, many customers are deploying gen AI-powered digital concierges to simplify tasks that are frustrating for patients, such as scheduling appointments, answering billing inquiries, and choosing healthcare plans. By investing in omni-channel strategies, healthcare providers can reduce administrative burdens while enhancing the overall patient experience.
Intuitive search: Transforming access to medical information
Healthcare providers need access to the latest medical research and treatment options to provide the best care for patients. When conducting research, traditional keyword searches can be challenging due to the complexities of medical terminology and abbreviations.
The emergence of semantic search, powered by clinical knowledge graphs, empowers healthcare workers to quickly and easily find information necessary to augment their patient care recommendations.
One of the leaders in this area is MEDITECH. It’s bringing advanced AI-powered search and summarization capabilities to its Expanse EHR, enabling clinicians to quickly and intuitively access comprehensive patient information from both structured and unstructured data sources.
For example, clinicians can use the Expanse EHR’s search and summarisation to instantly review past provider notes by specific section, such as “HPI” or “Assessment,” and to confirm patient conditions like sepsis or surgical site infections within minutes, eliminating the need for lengthy chart reviews.
Increasing security: Preparing for increased attacks
In 2025, healthcare systems will experience an increase in both the volume and sophistication of cyber attacks. It’s critical that organisations understand these risks, and adequately prepare their security teams. Best practices include implementing adversarial testing and conducting red team exercises to prepare for potential attacks.
The good news is that AI will not only transform healthcare, but it will also enhance the cybersecurity industry’s ability to mitigate attacks. To ensure AI is implemented responsibly, providers must invest in both AI and cybersecurity measures.
2025: A new era of healthcare
AI’s impact on healthcare represents a fundamental shift in how the industry operates. By embracing these emerging technologies and proactively addressing the associated challenges, healthcare providers can reduce administrative burdens, create a more efficient and effective system, and, most importantly, improve patient care.
