Google Is Making An "AI-Powered Assistant for Nurses and Doctors”

We'll Take That

What Google wants, Google gets — and right now, Google wants the Streams app.

Streams is a mobile healthcare app developed by DeepMind Health, a subsidiary of AI research company DeepMind, which, like Google, is a subsidiary of Alphabet.

As part of its efforts to snag a slice of the $3 trillion healthcare pie, Google is absorbing DeepMind Health, and according to a DeepMind blog post, the move could transform Streams into "an AI-powered assistant for nurses and doctors everywhere."

Streaming Lives

The Streams app is currently helping medical professionals in the U.K. address the problem of "failure to rescue," a term for what happens when a patient dies from a preventable condition because they didn't receive the right treatment in time.

The app does this by consolidating all of a patient's medical data. Everyone treating the patient can enter information into their file directly from the app, and the app can then send alerts to healthcare workers as soon as signs of a potentially life-threatening problem arise.

The Majors

Streams is currently used under very narrow conditions: only by workers at specific U.K. facilities and only for the detection of acute kidney injury. With Google's full support, though, the app could very well become the go-to medical tool of healthcare professional across the globe. And seemingly nothing would make the DeepMind team happier.

"This is a major milestone for DeepMind! One of the reasons for joining forces with Google in 2014 was the opportunity to use Google’s scale and experience in building billion-user products to bring our breakthroughs more rapidly to the wider world," they wrote in the blog post. "It’s been amazing to put this into practice in data centre efficiency, Android battery life, text-to-speech applications, and now the work of our Streams team."

More on DeepMind Health: Google Launches DeepMind Health, Bringing AI to Healthcare

Share This Article