Google and Singapore deepen partnership to advance frontier AI for healthcare and scientific discovery

This press release was issued by Google.


At the inaugural Google for Health Summit, Google announced new initiatives to advance the development and responsible application of AI. Building on the National AI Partnership established with the Singapore Government in May, the initiatives focus on three fronts – advancing frontiers in health, transforming care delivery for clinicians, and elevating population health for Singaporeans. Mr Tan Kiat How, Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Digital Development and Information & Ministry of Health, graced the event as the Guest of Honour.

The expanded collaboration brings together clinicians, researchers, and public agencies to tackle national health priorities while establishing Singapore as a regional launchpad for scalable, real-world health AI innovations.

Establishing Google Research in Singapore

Google Research is establishing its presence in Singapore with the launch of a new research hub. Starting with a local team of research scientists and software engineers, the group will focus on two key areas:

• Focusing on advancing foundational AI efficiency: Working alongside our global teams on frontier AI efficiency, a high priority area for Gen AI.
• Cultivating local scientific talent: Partnering closely with local academic institutions, including the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), to nurture future scientific leaders and provide targeted research support.

In addition, Google Research will scale its existing health research initiatives in the country. This includes applying open models like MedGemma to frontline care settings to enable the local healthcare ecosystem to develop secure, customized solutions while maintaining full data sovereignty.

Separately, to advance scientific research, Google.org, together with Google DeepMind, has joined the Philanthropy Asia Alliance’s (PAA’s) Health for Human Potential Coalition with a funding contribution of $7 million. As part of this commitment, $1 million from PAA will support PathGen, an AI-enabled public health intelligence platform developed through the Asia Pathogen Genomics Initiative and designed to help countries detect, understand and respond to communicable disease threats faster and more securely. Drawing on Google’s frontier technologies, the funding will advance PathGen’s research into genomic embeddings - compact AI representations that let genomic data be shared for public health intelligence while protecting in-country data sovereignty.

Transforming care delivery and preparedness for clinicians

Google DeepMind is working with National University Health System (NUHS) to initiate trusted tester evaluations as part of its global AI co-clinician research initiative. The initiative explores how AI can augment clinicians’ capabilities, and in the longer term, enable new models of care under clinician oversight.

The collaboration will evaluate the AI co-clinician as a clinician-facing decision-support tool in routine outpatient practice. The tool will assist doctors with clinical queries by synthesising information from existing clinical guidelines and medical literature. The study will assess the accuracy, safety and usefulness of the AI's responses through independent evaluation by clinicians against established clinical criteria.

Complementing this clinical research with broader workforce skilling, Google is also expanding its Google Career Certificates portfolio with the Google AI for Healthcare Professionals Certificate, an online program equipping healthcare workers to use AI for administrative tasks and continuous learning. Google will roll out the certificate through its established scholarship partners, and explore new local healthcare collaborations.

Advancing predictive, population-scale health with NHG Health

Google Cloud and NHG Health are collaborating on a first-of-its-kind Population Health Digital Transformation Programme to utilise AI-driven predictive insights to advance Singapore’s preventative healthcare efforts at scale. At the core of the programme are two integrated technological pillars.

• A predictive model: This model combines NHG Health’s de-identified population health database with Google's geospatial tooling and solutions that aggregates non-personally identifiable spatial-temporal data such as climate, environmental, search and behavioural signals. This engine forecasts health risks, such as chronic diseases and frailty, at a granular sub-population level.
• An AI-enabled Health Coach: These insights feed directly into an AI-enabled Health Coach on the NHG HealthBot leveraging Google’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience (GECX) platform. The coach delivers contextual lifestyle advice and preventive guidance directly to residents. Continuous, anonymized interactions refine the predictive models over time, creating a self-improving health ecosystem. The Health Coach initiative will focus on two preventive health use cases –screening uptake and frailty prevention, with a longer-term aspiration to integrate with national health platforms.

Reinforcing commitments to public good

These initiatives build on Google’s ongoing work to solve societal challenges and address public health priorities in Singapore. Previously announced initiatives include the development of Gemma Running Agent with SGEnable to support blind and low-vision runners, a partnership with healthtech startup AMILI on a precision nutrition program, and the expansion of the Debug facility in Singapore to combat Dengue as part of National Environment Agency’s Project Wolbachia.