AI-Based Innovations at Mayo Clinic

In our experience, there is no health care provider organization doing more with AI than Mayo Clinic. As Mayo Clinic’s hub for digital transformation, CDH is using data, analytics, machine learning, and AI to help improve patient health and deliver monitoring, diagnosis, and treatment recommendations through digital channels to patients around the world. Before any AI model goes into clinical deployment, Mayo Clinic and similar providers need to establish who will govern and lead its use, what the best practices are, what the scope of the model is, what the model’s biases are, and when to trust the model. Mayo Clinic is focused on how to generate AI use cases more rapidly with standardization of software, development processes, and technology. Over 200 use cases have already been part of the process, which it refers to as a “discovery-translation-application research continuum.” 

Mayo Clinic also collaborates closely with Google on AI, including its use of Google Cloud Platform, and has a few joint initiatives with Google Health, a unit that partners with health care provider organizations to conduct R&D and create solutions. Mayo Clinic has specific programs that support AI for the three domains of practice, research, and education. Mayo Clinic has also spun out several startups to commercialize its own AI research. It’s clear from our conversations and research that AI use at Mayo Clinic is exploding, but that growth comes with challenges. The key question, he said, is how Mayo Clinic can continue to support innovative efforts while providing frameworks for the creation of fair and explainable clinical AI models. It’s still too early to say how AI will reshape health care but perhaps not too early to predict that Mayo Clinic will play an important role in the transformation.