Google Cloud NEXT '26 Just Changed How I Think About Real-Time Clinical Decision Support

This is a submission for the Google Cloud NEXT Writing Challenge I've been obsessing over Clinical Decision Support (CDS) systems for years. And if you've ever built one — a real one, one that has to watch over a patient in the ICU at 2 AM, react to a blood pressure crash, cross-reference incoming lab results, parse a nursing note written in shorthand, and still deliver an actionable alert before it's too late — you know the dark secret at the heart of most of them. They are not real-time. They