Drive Health unveils AI health assistant powered by Google

Digital health startup Drive Health, launched an AI health assistant in collaboration with Google Public Sector. The aim of Nurse Avery is to serve as a secure, responsive and personalized healthcare assistant.  The application offers access to care plan details, medication instructions and answers to symptom-related questions, while facilitating communication with providers.  The AI assistant's capabilities also include real-time chart reviews, appointment scheduling and proactive engagement. According to the company, by getting rid of the need to navigate complex phone menus or endure frustrating delays, Nurse Avery makes patients feel confident that their providers are always informed.  Built on Google Cloud’s security and auditing capabilities, the AI assistant upholds HIPAA compliance to safeguard patient data.  "We are thrilled to partner with Drive Health in launching Nurse Avery, a technology with immense potential to redefine patient care,” Chris Hein, field chief technology officer at Google Public Sector, said in a statement.  "This collaboration exemplifies Google’s commitment to innovation and supporting organizations that are paving the way for accessible, equitable healthcare solutions." THE LARGER TREND Google has a major presence in the healthcare sector.  Last year, Dr. Michael Howell, chief clinical officer at Google, told MobiHealthNews that the industry should be prepared for continued rapid progress in AI's capabilities to transform healthcare.  "True multimodality is here, meaning AI that can understand not just text but also pictures, audio and video. It's a deeply important change, and it will really begin to enter healthcare in a serious way in 2025.  We're also seeing a sharp rise in demand from enterprises that want to use AI agents to help complete complex tasks, not just answer questions or summarize documents. I think that move toward agents is very likely to continue into 2025," Howell said.  Google unveiled Health AI Developer Foundations (HAI-DEF) in 2024, a public resource for healthcare developers that provides open-weight models to help them build healthcare applications, initially focused on dermatology, radiology and pathology.  Open-weight AI models are a type of black box AI technology that permits developers to apply and fine-tune a model for specific tasks, and that allows them to adapt and build upon previous work.  HAI-DEF is publicly available for developers building and implementing AI models. It includes the open-weight models, documentation to assist in the various stages of development, and instructional Colab notebooks, which allow developers to write and execute code. Google licensed its AI model focused on detecting diabetic retinopathy to partners in Thailand and India, two countries the tech giant says have a shortage of eye specialists.  Google research teams partnered with foundational research partners Aravind Eye Hospital in India and Rajavithi Hospital in Thailand almost a decade ago to research whether AI could be used to help lower preventable blindness caused by diabetic retinopathy.