Google Cloud is tackling the cumbersome problem in healthcare of slow preauthorization of recommended procedures, medications, or devices. On April 13, the company introduced its AI-enabled Claims Acceleration Suite to reduce these administrative burdens and costs for health plans and providers. The prior authorization process causes burnout for physicians, notes Amy Waldron, director of Global Health Plans Strategy and Solutions for Google Cloud. In fact, 88% of physicians call it "very or extremely" burdensome, according to the Medical Group Management Association. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid says prior authorizations take an average of 10 days.

Google Cloud pulled back the curtain yesterday on two artificial intelligence tools designed to help healthcare and life science organizations scan and analyze large volumes of unstructured text, the Healthcare Natural Language API and AutoML Entity Extraction for Healthcare. The first of these two offerings looks to automatically extract common trends or other insights from medical records notes or other digital text that would normally require time-intensive manual review. According to the company, the machine learning tool discerns clinically relevant information based on the context of surrounding language, allowing the technology to, for instance, distinguish between past and newly prescribed medications. The Healthcare Natural Language API can be deployed within a provider organization for analysis, or can be implemented within a range of health applications that support unstructured text, Google said. AutoML Entity Extraction for Healthcare, meanwhile, seeks to lower the barrier to AI text data analysis for healthcare workers.