Mayo Clinic has entered into a 10-year strategic partnership with Google that will oversee the development of digital technologies for enhancing care delivery.

The Minnesota-based practice plans to use Google Cloud’s advanced cloud computing, as well as data analytics, machine learning and AI capabilities to help solve complex medical problems and better meet the needs of people.

"Mayo Clinic teams already are using artificial intelligence and developing new AI-driven tools that will benefit patients. For example, health care data and artificial intelligence can be used to more accurately and efficiently predict individual risk for adverse outcomes such as hospital readmission or complications during surgery," Christopher Ross, the chief information officer for Mayo Clinic, told HCB News. "It can also help determine the nature of a brain tumor without needing a biopsy. When providers have easy-to-access insights from data, they can take actions to decrease risks for patients, and deliver the right diagnoses and treatments at the right time."
Mayo Clinic aims to use Google’s AI-enabled digital diagnostics technology to advance its virtual care services, as well as the way it conducts medical research. It will also develop and deploy new machine learning models to improve treatment precision and clinical outcomes of diseases. Data for such endeavors will be stored and secured by Google Cloud, though the clinic will retain control over access to and use of the information with Google’s cloud technologies. The data will be used to create healthcare insights and solutions in collaboration with partners, including Google.

Google will help in this process by opening a new office in Rochester, so that its engineers can work closely with Mayo Clinic's staff to apply advanced computing techniques to healthcare problems.

"Mayo Clinic will develop better technological capabilities to improve diagnoses, discover new cures, and make treatment accessible to patients in places beyond hospital walls or a doctor's office — all while enhancing data security," said Ross. "Google engineers will work side by side with Mayo Clinic information technology professionals, physicians, scientists and research staff to use data analytics, artificial intelligence and other data science tools to discover insights from large amounts of data."

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