Google is setting up a research hub in Singapore and putting its AI models to work inside the public healthcare system, from a clinician tool at the National University Health System to an AI health coach for NHG Health patients. The plans, in a Google post by Ben King, Country Managing Director of Google Singapore, came at the first Google for Health Summit in Singapore on 29 October.
The company frames the work as a partnership with the Ministry of Health to deploy frontier AI across the healthcare system. None of the patient-facing pieces is live yet. Each starts as an evaluation or a programme with a named public healthcare group.
A research hub built on local hires
The new Google Research hub will be staffed by research scientists and software engineers based in Singapore. Its focus is foundational AI models aimed at speeding up scientific discovery, and it will work with the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University on research support and training for younger scientists.
Google Research will also scale up its existing health projects here. That includes bringing open models such as MedGemma into frontline care, so that hospitals can build their own tools on top of them while keeping patient data within the country.
A co-clinician that starts in simulation
Google DeepMind is working with NUHS to evaluate an AI co-clinician. The tool pulls together medical guidelines and published literature, and answers doctors’ clinical questions while they treat patients.
The initiative explores a future in which AI takes part in patient-management workflows under a physician’s oversight, beginning in simulation before any move towards real-world use. “Simulation first. Careful observation next. Real-world deployment only when the evidence supports it,” Tan Kiat How told the summit.
An AI health coach on NHG HealthBot
The second clinical project sits with NHG Health. Google Cloud is working with the healthcare group on a population health programme that uses predictive models to forecast health risks, such as chronic conditions, across groups of residents.
Those forecasts feed an AI health coach inside the NHG HealthBot, built on Google’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience platform. The coach is meant to give residents personalised lifestyle advice and reminders for preventive care, while clinically sensitive or urgent cases are routed to the right care channels.
Funding for faster disease detection
Google.org and Google DeepMind are also funding the Philanthropy Asia Alliance’s Health for Human Potential Coalition. Part of the money goes to PathGen, an AI platform built on Google technology that helps countries spot disease threats sooner and share public health data without giving up control of it.
