This year’s HLTH conference brought a bevy of news announcements — from partnerships to new product features to acquisitions and more. In this list, MedCity News compiled short summaries for 11 of the conference’s most notable announcements.

This year, HCA Healthcare and Google Cloud have expanded their partnership by exploring ways to integrate Google’s generative AI into HCA’s workflows. The most developed project under this initiative is a pilot that began in February in which HCA’s emergency department physicians are testing a voice-enabled medical dictation tool to save them time on clinical documentation.

Over the past year, Meditech has deepened its relationship with Google Cloud by exploring ways to embed Google’s generative AI into its EHR. Some of the use cases the EHR vendor is exploring include an enhanced search and summarization tool that would present clinicians with a longitudinal view of their patient and a tool that would auto-generate clinical documentation for the hospital course summary.

Google Cloud and Mayo Clinic recently announced a partnership focused on generative AI — the health system will be deploying a new HIPAA-compliant Google Cloud service called Gen App Builder. The tool enables providers to create a search system for their data, equipped with conversational features powered by Google’s large language models.

NourishedRx is a food-as-medicine company that offers dietary assistance for health plans’ members through methods like medically-tailored meals, grocery support and diet education. Through the new platform, NourishedRx is able to communicate with its food partners, health plan customers and members.

Medical device manufacturer iCAD entered into a development and commercialization agreement with Google Health, in which it will integrate Google’s mammography AI technology into its suite of breast imaging AI products. The agreement marks Google’s first commercial partnership to deploy its breast imaging AI model into clinical practice.

The new platform is a “digital front door” for members, offered on the web and through the My Highmark app. It will help members with scheduling appointments, accessing primary care and urgent care, managing prescription drugs and other services. It will roll out in January.

Google Cloud unveiled a new product suite to make medical imaging data more interoperable and useful via artificial intelligence. Hackensack Meridian Health has begun using it to detect metastasis in prostate cancer patients earlier, and Hologic is using it to strengthen its diagnostic platform that screens women for cervical cancer.

The speed of Covid-19 vaccine trials should inspire the pharmaceutical and medical device industries to accelerate its clinical testing, according to Shweta Maniar, Google Cloud’s director for healthcare and life sciences. She argued that harnessing real-world data will make faster clinical trials achievable for all therapeutics and devices, possibly even eliminating the need to recruit a placebo arm.

The New Jersey-based health system initially partnered with Google in 2019. It has now migrated to Google Workspace, providing thousands of Chrome OS devices to remote workers, and is using Google Cloud AI capabilities to detect diseases like breast cancer and Covid-19.

The companies will build their claims processing platform on Google Cloud’s infrastructure, leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. The goal of the collaboration is to improve patient and provider experience and reduce spending on administrative processes.

As Google and Microsoft compete over their cloud capabilities for healthcare, both companies are touting tools to make clinicians’ lives easier by streamlining documentation or making records searchable.  At MedCity INVEST Digital Health, executives from both companies agreed on one thing: these tools should play a supporting role for clinicians while keeping patients at the center. 

INVEST Digital Health is scheduled for September 20-23, and held in collaboration with Medical Alley. It brings together innovative investors across the healthcare spectrum, prominent industry players and the most promising digital health startups. It will be virtual due to Covid-19.

Google is piloting its healthcare data engine, a tool intended to build longitudinal patient records and pull in data from multiple sources. Early work with Mayo Clinic served as a foundation for the technology. 

Both cloud competitors are offering solutions that use FHIR to pull together and standardize health data from disparate sources. Google recently unveiled a solution based on its work with Mayo Clinic.

Healthcare delivery is one of the themes at the annual MedCity News virtual INVEST conference, April 19-23. Register today!

Verily become part of a six-year collaboration between Google Cloud and Highmark Health. A big part of the partnership will be Verily’s platform for managing chronic conditions, Onduo.

After Google struck a controversial partnership with Ascension to build a searchable health record, the companies are now launching an expanded clinical pilot of the tool. Now, about 250 clinicians will be able to use it.

The insurer, which also owns Allegheny Health Network, struck a six-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud, which includes building out a new platform to help better manage patient care.

Amazon Web Services rolled out a new tool, called Amazon HealthLake, to help healthcare and life sciences companies manage their data. The goal is to make it easier for companies to search their data and perform analysis on it.

Google Cloud developed a suite of tools using natural language processing to help healthcare workers review and analyze medical documents more easily.

Telehealth company Amwell went public on Thursday in an upsized IPO. Its stock debuted at $18 per share, above its previous target price of $14 to $16.

Telehealth company Amwell priced its stock between $14 and $16 per share for its upcoming IPO. It plans to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange as AMWL.

The Defense Innovation Unit launched a new pilot project that will use AI combined with augmented reality microscopes to help medical professionals better identify cancer cells. Google Cloud was tasked with designing the solution.

In a new collaboration with Google, Fitbit is hoping to enhance its healthcare credibility. By using the Google Healthcare API, Fitbit hopes to accelerate interoperability with existing and future healthcare partners.