Google launches an AI agent for U.S. hospitals and insurers

U.S. hospitals and insurers can now try Gemini for healthcare, an artificial intelligence agent from Google Cloud that summarizes medical records, prepares appointments and reviews insurance prior authorizations. It is a preview for Gemini Enterprise Standard and Plus customers, and there is no date, price or plan for the public in Mexico.

An agent is a program that chains several steps on its own instead of answering a single question. This one connects to Epic and Oracle Health electronic records through read-only connectors, and does not write back to the patient chart, the company says. It also links to databases such as CMS, RxNorm and ICD-10, and lets customers choose among models from Google, Anthropic and OpenAI.

Launch customers include HCA Healthcare, Northwell Health, Highmark Health, Hartford HealthCare, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Optum and Stanford School of Medicine. HCA chief medical officer Michael J. Schlosser said the company is exploring how to help physicians understand a patient's history. Northwell CEO John D'Angelo said: "we expect to ease some of the administrative burden on our clinical teams." Those are expectations, not measured results.

Google's pitch rests on two assurances it makes itself: records, prompts and outputs stay in each organization's dedicated environment and are not used to train its models, and the agent runs with access controls, audit logs and human oversight. No one outside the company has verified either claim.

There is also no data on its accuracy, its error rate or the time it saves. The only number Google offers is a 2024 study putting the time clinicians spend on paperwork at nearly 28 hours a week. That describes the problem the product targets. It does not measure the product.

Google has not said when the agent will leave preview or whether it will reach other countries. The NextGen connector is still in development, and Optum's are in limited testing.