Apollo Hospitals partners with Google Cloud for its digital platform – Times of India

Apollo Hospitals has announced a 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. According to a report by McKinsey & Company, 60% of hospitals, 75% of pharmacies, and 80% of doctors are in urban areas. This leaves the rural areas underserved. So, this technology presents an opportunity to improve access to healthcare for Indians countrywide.
Apollo 24|7: More details
Built entirely on Google Cloud, Apollo 24|7 aims to deliver various healthcare experiences 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 analysed using Google Cloud’s advanced AI and machine learning technologies. Apollo Hospitals is also exploring the use of Med-PaLM 2, an LLM developed by Google that is trained in medical knowledge and can answer medical questions and generate clinical text summaries.

Providing a highly scalable, modernised 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 have the potential to make diagnosis more accessible, accurate and affordable. Both organisations are collaborating to find new ways to bring the best health information to people in the future.
Google’s AI appraoch
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 are 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 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.