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The world’s largest technology companies are racing to build generative AI into every corner of health and medicine.

Microsoft has formed an alliance with the electronic health records vendor Epic to wire the technology into dozens of health software products. Google is infusing it into tools used by hospitals to collect and organize data on millions of patients. Not to be outdone, Amazon has unveiled a service to help build clinical note scribes, and is separately working to embed generative AI in drug research and development.

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All of this has unfolded faster than federal regulators could blink — or answer questions about how the technology should be tested and evaluated, whether it will help or hurt patients, and how it will impact privacy and the use of personal data.

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