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How doctors and nurses shape Google’s AI  

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At the HLTH conference, I sat down with a suite of Google’s top health execs including chief clinical officer Michael Howell, who leads a team of doctors and nurses who co-develop health products across the company like large language model Med-PaLM, Search, and YouTube. Howell, who reports to chief health officer Karen DeSalvo, said Google’s goal is to bring clinical and health equity experts into the design process very early on. “Our thesis is, if you’re going to make something that is health specific, instead of having a clinical expert as a subject matter expert who gives input at the beginning and input at the end, that a product is made by a thousand little decisions along the way,” he said. “It doesn’t really help if I come and just give random advice about pulmonology…I have to know the product constraints, the technical constraints and the business constraints.”

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