googles approach where machines learn to parse data on their own can just leapfrog everything else said vik bajaj a former executive at verily an alphabet healthcare arm and managing director of investment firm foresite capital they understand what problems are worth solving he said theyve now done enough small experiments to know exactly what the fruitful directions aredean envisions the ai system steering doctors toward certain medications and diagnoses another google researcher said existing models miss obvious medical events including whether a patient had prior surgery the person described existing handcoded models as an obvious gigantic roadblock in health care the person asked not to be identified discussing work in progressfor all the optimism over googles potential harnessing ai to improve healthcare outcomes remains a huge challenge other companies notably ibms watson unit have tried to apply ai to medicine but have had limited success saving money and integrating the technology into reimbursement systemsgoogle has long sought access to digital medical records also with mixed results for its recent research the internet giant cut deals with the university of california san francisco and the university of chicago for 46 billion pieces of anonymous patient data googles ai system created predictive models for each hospital not one that parses data across the two a harder problem a solution for all hospitals would be even more challenging google is working to secure new partners for access to more recordsa deeper dive into health would only add to the vast amounts of information google already has on us companies like google and other tech giants are going to have a unique almost monopolistic ability to capitalize on all the data we generate said andrew burt chief privacy officer for data company immuta he and pediatric oncologist samuel volchenboum wrote a recent column arguing governments should prevent this data from becoming the province of only a few companies like in online advertising where google reignsgoogle is treading carefully when it comes to patient information particularly as public scrutiny over datacollection rises last year british regulators slapped deepmind another alphabet ai lab for testing an app that analyzed public medical records without telling patients that their information would be used like this with the latest study google and its hospital partners insist their data is anonymous secure and used with patient permission volchenboum said the company may have a more difficult time maintaining that data rigor if it expands to smaller hospitals and healthcare networksstill volchenboum believes these algorithms could save lives and money he hopes health records will be mixed with a sea of other stats eventually ai models could include information on local weather and traffic other factors that influence patient outcomes its almost like the hospital is an organism he saidfew companies are better poised to analyze this organism than google the company and its alphabet cousin verily are developing devices to track far more biological signals even if consumers dont take up wearable health trackers en masse google has