Mayo Clinic has expanded its long-term collaboration with Mercy, giving researchers access to decades of deidentified clinical data through the Mayo Clinic Platform.

The effort allows scientists and developers to analyze combined data sets from both organizations within Mayo Clinic’s secure infrastructure. Mercy operates 55 acute care and specialty hospitals across Midwestern communities and is among the 15 largest health systems in the United States.

With Mercy’s participation, the platform now provides access to deidentified records from more than 15.2 million patients. The data include 12.6 billion medical images, 3.2 billion lab results, 10.1 million pathology reports and 1.65 billion clinical notes. Mayo Clinic said expanding the data pool may help reduce demographic bias that can arise from single-institution studies, and support research across broader patient populations.
“This collaboration opens the door to insights no single health system could achieve alone, and reflects Mayo Clinic's commitment to transforming the future of healthcare,” said Dr. John Halamka, president of Mayo Clinic Platform. “This work is designed to drive innovation in healthcare by accelerating research and enabling the creation of new solutions that transform future clinical practice.”

The organizations said each will retain control of its own data. Information remains within Mayo Clinic Platform’s privacy-preserving environment and is not transferred between systems.

“This joint effort will transform healthcare to predict illness earlier, improve outcomes, shorten hospital stays, and deliver more proactive, patient-centered care that ultimately saves lives,” said Dr. Gavin Helton, president of primary care at Mercy.

The collaboration is part of a 10-year agreement between the two systems focused on research and innovation. Mercy is also a founding member of Mayo Clinic Platform_Connect, a network intended to link health systems and technology developers through access to curated, deidentified data. Mayo Clinic said additional partner data sets are expected to become available on the platform later this year.

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