April 29, 2024, could one day be an important historical date for the health care industry and pharmacy. It’s when Google researchers published a paper detailing the capabilities of something they’re calling Med-Gemini, offering “multimodal and long context reasoning.” Translation? An artificial intelligence application that goes beyond matching likely diagnoses to an array of symptoms and can, with apparently a great deal of accuracy, capture the circumstances of a patient’s symptoms, the timing of symptoms’ onset, and what the sequence of symptoms might mean for the patient. As one Forbes contributor put it, this development addresses one of the chief complaints about algorithms and AI in general, which is their inability to understand the richness that context offers. Yes, first-generation AI applications in health can parse health records, read X-rays, analyze photos, and interpret intake questions. But the open question that several news outlets have explored about Med-Gemini is about the context of eliciting context, which is to say the trust and empathy that health care providers forge with their patients to deliver the best possible diagnosis-i.e. it’s the relationship that matters, not the relational zeros and ones of data input. Stay tuned to qAM for more as this story develops and check out some of our earlier reporting on the general question of what AI offers pharmacies.
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