Clinicians spend nearly 28 hours a week on documentation and administrative work, according to research by The Harris Poll and Google Cloud. The company is positioning its new Gemini for Healthcare system, now in preview for Gemini Enterprise customers, as a way to coordinate those tasks across clinical and administrative workflows.
The agentic AI system builds on Google’s general-purpose Gemini agent and offers specialised skills for summarising medical records, preparing for appointments, reviewing coverage and policies, and determining payer benefits. Organisations can create custom skills for other workflows. Google says human oversight is built into each workflow, while agents carry out multi-step tasks within defined guardrails.
The launch comes as administrative demands weigh on providers and health plans. A 2025 American Medical Association report found that 41.9 percent of physicians experience burnout linked to documentation pressure. The American Hospital Association estimates administrative costs account for 25 percent to 35 percent of total US healthcare spending. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said healthcare’s fundamental challenge was “the immense friction of making that data actionable across a highly regulated ecosystem.”
Read-only connections and oversight
Gemini for Healthcare connects to Epic through open.epic APIs and to Oracle Health through Ignite APIs for FHIR. The integrations bring active conditions, medications and recent lab results into the context used by agents, but do not write information back to electronic health record systems. Google says the read-only design protects clinical data integrity.
InterSystems FHIR Server supports data exchange, while Verato resolves patient identity across visits. Keragon connects to more than 400 healthcare applications; integration with NextGen Healthcare is still in development. The system preserves existing role-based access controls and includes audit logs and verifiable citations. Google says responses draw on verified patient charts, approved guidelines and evidence.
Patient records, prompts and outputs stay in an organisation’s dedicated Google Cloud enterprise environment. The company says it does not use customer data to train foundation models and that the architecture supports HIPAA compliance. Security partners include Check Point and Cyera.
For payer and related workflows, the platform can access CMS Coverage Data and the National Provider Identifier Registry, alongside RxNorm, ICD-10 and the IMO Health Knowledge Graph. Optum Network Eligibility and Coordination of Benefits is in limited release and testing. Prior authorisation runs through Infinitus Relay, with Waystar and Cognizant Trizetto supporting revenue cycle integration and GoodRx supplying pricing data.
Other integrations include Optum EvidenceVue, ASCO guidelines and BMJ Digital Health content for clinical evidence; Suki’s Ambient Clinical Intelligence; and tools from UiPath, Alteryx and Synthpop. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 centralise communications, while ServiceNow, Salesforce Health Cloud and Workday’s Sana support coordination and enterprise workflows.
The platform offers model choices from Google, Anthropic and OpenAI, with smart routing intended to match tasks to models. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Hartford HealthCare and HCA Healthcare are launch and testing customers. Highmark Health, Northwell Health, Optum and Stanford School of Medicine are testing the preview; ASCO is contributing guidelines content.
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