Manipal Hospitals and Google Cloud partner to transform nurse handoffs with GenAI

As one of India’s largest healthcare providers, Manipal Hospitals serves nearly 7 million patients annually across 37 hospitals. To deliver clinical excellence and patient-centric care at a high standard, we are continually embracing technology.  One of our most significant operational challenges we consistently face is the nurse handover process—a critical but time-consuming task. To make nurse handovers more efficient, safe and accurate, we entered a strategic partnership with the Google Cloud Consulting team to co-develop a generative AI solution, leveraging the power of  Google Cloud.

Rethinking time-consuming, error-prone nurse handoffs

The process of transferring essential information about a patient’s condition and care plan from an outgoing nurse to an incoming one is crucial for ensuring continuity of care and patient safety. However, with more than 10,500 beds across our hospitals, the sheer volume of data required for a comprehensive handover meant our nurses routinely added an extra 90 minutes to their shifts for both creating and receiving these reports. This lengthy process could directly affect patient care, as it could lead  to fatigue and potential mistakes, and also reduce job satisfaction for our vital nursing staff. We needed a way to make this process faster, more accurate, and less of a burden.

Building a trusted solution on Google Cloud

Our joint Manipal-Google team knew that for a clinical tool to be adopted by over 5,000 nurses, it had to be both fast and trustworthy. The primary challenge with any generative AI application in healthcare is ensuring accuracy and minimizing the risk of AI “hallucinations.”

The solution’s architecture, designed by the Google Cloud Consulting team, addresses this head-on by leveraging multiple Google Cloud components. Patient data from our TrakCare system is securely transferred in near real-time to a data lake on Google Cloud. When a nurse requests a handover summary, a serverless Cloud Run application orchestrates a multi-stage process.

Critically, instead of passing pages of raw data directly to the AI, the system first uses intelligent, time-based filters to extract only the most relevant clinical information for the specific shift. This structured, pre-processed data is then sent to Gemini on Vertex AI. This “controlled generation” approach was a key innovation; it ensures Gemini summarizes only the most pertinent facts, dramatically improving the accuracy and consistency of the final ISBAR (Identify, Situation, Background, Assessment, and Recommendation) report. The ability of Gemini to understand complex medical terminology, medication names, and clinical procedures without specialized fine-tuning was a game-changer, accelerating the entire development process.

How our partnership delivered results

By combining Manipal’s deep clinical expertise and Google Cloud Consulting’s technical leadership, our joint approach provides a blueprint for enterprise-grade AI implementation:

• From ideation to production: The Google Cloud Consulting team led the engagement from the initial idea all the way to a production-ready solution now used by thousands of nurses daily. The project started with a focused Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to prove the technology’s value before scaling.

• User-centric design: The solution was not built in a vacuum. The Google team conducted over eight rounds of deep discussion and evaluation sessions directly with our nurses. This ensured the final ISBAR summary format was not just technically impressive, but clinically useful from day one.

• Agile and iterative rollout: The solution was piloted at one hospital initially to test its performance and safety in a real-world setting. With a successful pilot, the solution is live in 23 of Manipal hospitals, and used by more than 5,000 every day. At full scale, it is projected to help save significant nurse hours on a daily basis.  This phased approach, managed jointly, has allowed us to gather feedback and ensure smooth adoption.

Ensuring better patient care

The generative AI solution we implemented has yielded impressive returns. The 70% reduction in handoff time—from 90 minutes down to 20—frees our nurses to focus more on direct patient needs and care. It also makes the process less vulnerable to errors that can arise from handwritten notes and human fatigue.

This project, delivered in partnership with Google Cloud Consulting, is a prime example of how we are pioneering the future of healthcare in India, helping us scale the delivery of quality care across the length and breadth of the country.

^{We’d like to give special thanks to Google Cloud Consulting team –  Naveen Poosarla, Gopala Dhar, Rupjit Chakraborty, Hem Anand, Amit Dutta, Nishant Welpulwar, Preetam Dey and Shikha Saxena – for designing and developing the solution. We are grateful to the Manipal Hospitals team – Saroja Jaykumar, Sunil Bhattacharjee –  in delivering this successful project.}