It’s a common refrain in hospitals, health systems and other enterprises: As technology increases in popularity and usefulness, the sprawl that ensues makes management and governance more difficult. In that sense, artificial intelligence tools follow in the well-worn footsteps of laptops, smartphones, tablets and wearable devices.
Last year, Google introduced Google Agentspace, now part of Gemini Enterprise. The platform represents Google’s efforts to create a unified and secure “front door” for its powerful AI technology, according to Miguel Aguilar, Google Cloud strategic alliance lead at CDW.
“Google is bringing all of its AI tools together into one cohesive platform, making them accessible and valuable to everyone, from developers to frontline employees,” he says. That way, users can benefit regardless of their technical expertise.
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Taking AI Out of Silos in Healthcare
Gemini Enterprise has six core components.
- The Brains – Access to Google’s most advanced Gemini models
- The Taskforce – Access to a suite of specialized, prebuilt AI Agents such as Deep Research, Code Assist or NotebookLM
- The Workbench – A platform for every employee featuring low- and no-code tools for building custom agents
- The Ecosystem – A comprehensive and open agentic ecosystem of third-party agents and partner solutions
- The Context – Secure connections to company data, which grounds the AI to business reality
- The Governance – Centralized auditing and governance framework, critical for highly regulated industries
The platform aims to solve an all-too-familiar problem for healthcare: a proliferation of disparate AI products working in silos, unable to share their data or otherwise learn from each other. Organizations could have made incremental improvements with chatbots and search tools, for example, but they weren’t otherwise connected, Aguilar says. “Now, you can maintain and manage one tool. You can go from entering prompts to automating entire workflows.”
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Making Gemini Enterprise Work for Healthcare Organizations
According to Aguilar, healthcare and life sciences organizations are well positioned to benefit from Gemini Enterprise, given the amount of data they work with and the layers of security and regulatory protection that data needs.
The first step in getting started with Gemini Enterprise is assessing where that data lives. That’s because an AI agent’s strength depends largely on the data it can access. Integrating Gemini Enterprise with common clinical and business applications helps eliminate the data silos that make work difficult in healthcare. The platform will respect the role-based privileges and access controls a health system already has in place, Aguilar notes. “The policies are the responsibility of the organizations implementing Gemini Enterprise.”
The next step is putting the data to work. In some cases, gleaning insights from an enterprisewide data set may be enough. For example, a hospital may uncover previously unknown details about unmet health and social needs in its patient population that could be solved by automating complex, time-consuming tasks.
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“The value is in analysis and identification of key items that may pop up — things that in a normal research cycle would require looking at Excel or a raw data set and interpreting that on its own,” Aguilar says. “When you think of the cycles of compute time and time to structure, analyze and interpret data, it’s shrinking from days or even weeks to minutes.”
Beyond generating insights, Gemini Enterprise offers the potential to automate tasks through access to AI agents. Here, Aguilar uses the example of quarterly compliance audits — necessary but time-consuming — to encourage organizations to think big.
An AI agent can automatically complete a report and create alerts for items that need attention, such as user accounts with unnecessary permissions. The organization could take things a step further and send those alerts to a second AI agent that remediates the problem and tells the first agent the issue has been revolved. From there, the first agent sends the completed report to the auditing department for review at a high level. Not only are auditors spared the task of creating lengthy documents, but also IT and security teams aren’t spending hours doing work that’s little more than checking boxes.
Here are a few other examples related to healthcare:
- Accelerating clinical trials. An AI agent could automate the process of identifying eligible patients for a clinical trial by analyzing electronic health records and clinical notes, significantly reducing the time and effort required for patient recruitment.
- Streamlining revenue cycle management. AI agents can automate prior authorization requests, verify insurance eligibility in real time and assist with medical coding, reducing denials and improving the financial health of the organization.
- Enhancing clinical decision support. By analyzing a patient's complete medical history, including imaging data and genomic information, a Gemini agent could provide clinicians with critical insights and evidence-based recommendations at the point of care.
How A Partner Helps Health Systems Implement Gemini Enterprise
Though AI is nothing new for an industry where data analysis and research are common, AI agents that power workflow automation may be unfamiliar territory for healthcare. “It’s a new conversation,” Aguilar says. That’s where a service provider such as CDW can prove beneficial.
As noted, the conversation begins with assessing where to find an organization’s applications and its data. That can be a tall order, especially if disparate apps have been deployed for research initiatives or pilot programs, or if satellite clinics have recently been added to a hospital network. Healthcare organizations must also determine who has access to what, Aguilar says, and whether existing permissions should remain in place. “They need to understand their environment, and how to secure it and maintain it.”
A knowledgeable partner like CDW can also help organizations identify the right use cases for getting started (Aguilar recommends a “complex but noncritical area where you can have an immediate impact”) and provide resources for user training, change management and any necessary governance or security policy changes.
The end goal, though, is for healthcare organizations to “be masters of their own tools.” Aguilar adds: “Google has positioned Gemini Enterprise as a platform for end users to just play with, using low- and no-code tools or specialized agents. There’s something in there for everyone.”
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