Mumbai, India, 6 September 2023 – Apollo Hospitals today announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud to put healthcare in the hands of every Indian with Apollo’s digital platform, Apollo 24|7.
Access to healthcare in India is challenging. 60% of hospitals, 75% of pharmacies, and 80% of doctors are in urban areas (source: McKinsey & Company), leaving rural areas underserved. Technology presents an opportunity to improve access to healthcare for Indians countrywide.
Built entirely on Google Cloud, Apollo 24|7 aims to deliver an omnichannel healthcare experience to people in India with telemedicine services, online doctor consultations, home delivery of medication, and improved clinician decision making. Key pillars of this partnership include:
- The development of an AI-powered clinical decision support system: Apollo 24|7 teams worked with Google Cloud to build a Clinical Intelligence Engine (CIE) using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and generative AI (gen AI) models. This enables doctors to identify the next best action for patients during consultations. The CIE service leverages data from Apollo Hospitals and large language models (LLMs) from Google Cloud to create a proprietary solution in which all patient data is kept securely within the hospitals’ systems.
- The AskApollo patient-facing service: The platform also powers AskApollo, which helps patients with care navigation services. This first-of-its-kind service is built on top of Apollo’s CIE, which was developed using millions of real-world clinical data points gathered over 40 years of clinical excellence, and analyzed using Google Cloud’s advanced AI and machine learning technologies. Apollo Hospitals is also exploring the use of Med-PaLM 2, a LLM developed by Google that is trained on medical knowledge, and can answer medical questions and generate clinical text summaries.
- Providing a highly scalable, modernized cloud platform for Apollo 24|7: Apollo 24|7 is India’s largest and fastest growing health platform. In collaboration with Google Cloud partner, Searce, the Apollo 24|7 engineering teams deployed 78 microservices and 40+ databases on Google Cloud with zero downtime. The Apollo 24|7 data lake is also built on Google BigQuery, which brings together siloed data onto a single platform to help drive better decision making and clinical outcomes.
- Delivering authentic healthcare information on Search: Google has long worked with Apollo Hospitals to source authoritative and helpful health information for features on Google Search. Google’s deep AI capabilities combined with Apollo Hospital’s 40 years of experience in healthcare has the potential to make diagnosis more accessible, accurate, and affordable, and the two organizations are collaborating to find new ways to bring the best of health information to people in the future.
“Access to timely and accurate health information is a real challenge in India, and our partnership with Google Cloud is poised to address it through various collaborations. Apollo’s expertise, data and hospital network will help shape a new era of precision and empathy in clinical decision making with medical grade generative AI, and AskApollo embodies the fusion of technology and compassion to revolutionize patient care,” said Shobana Kamineni, Vice Chairperson, Apollo Hospitals.
“Generative AI has the transformative power to bring conversational medicine to clinicians and patients alike,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. “Our work with Apollo Hospitals will improve accessibility in healthcare, support clinicians and care teams, and drive better patient engagement—ultimately benefiting millions of Indians.”
Google Cloud’s approach to data governance and privacy policies ensures customers retain control over their data. In healthcare settings, access and use of patient data is protected through the implementation of Google Cloud’s reliable infrastructure and secure data storage, along with each customer’s security, privacy controls, and processes. Google’s responsible approach to generative AI also means customers have access to monitor and review model outputs and leverage safety guardrails and model documentation to enable responsible use in a customer’s use case and context.
