Mayo Clinic Teams Up With Google Cloud

Sept. 10, 2019

Goal is to develop machine learning models designed to improve treatment precision, clinical outcomes of diseases

Mayo Clinic has announced a 10-year partnership that will make Google Cloud the cornerstone of its digital transformation.

Through its partnership with Google, Mayo Clinic said it would develop and deploy new machine learning models designed to improve treatment precision and clinical outcomes of diseases.

With the help of Google, Mayo Clinic said it would transform the way it advances virtual care with AI-enabled digital diagnostics. Mayo also will leverage Google technology to boost its ability to conduct medical research.

Google Cloud will secure and store Mayo Clinic's data, while working with Mayo Clinic to apply AI and other cloud computing technologies to solve complex healthcare problems. However, Mayo Clinic stressed that it would continue to control access and use of its patient data by using Google's cloud technologies. Mayo Clinic will specifically authorize the use of data in projects to create new healthcare insights and solutions in conjunction with partners, including Google. Mayo Clinic will manage access to all data using its institutional controls.

“Patients are going to benefit in two ways,” said Christopher Ross, Mayo’s CIO, in a video on Mayo’s website. “One, more data is going to drive more cures. If we can make data available to researchers and scientists, they will find more breakthroughs. The most important breakthroughs are coming through insights driven by data, and more powerful data and deeper data. The second way patients will benefit is that they expect their data to be secure and private. We are going to use the power of a cloud-based environment to make sure that data is always secure and private.”

Ross added that the needs of patients are changing. “People expect to have experience from healthcare like they get when they book an AirB&B or an Uber down the street from them. They are looking for speed, immediacy, availability and high touch.” Our goal is to move data into the cloud environment as soon as we possibly can, and we will be doing that with a team of Google engineers and Mayo engineers.”

Steve Peters, M.D., chief medical information officer, said, “We have been on electronic records, in one form or another, for 20 years. As of last year we converged all Mayo Clinci onto a single electronic records platform. There is a lot more to be done and more tools to bring to bear. We can’t do all of that ourselves. So partnering with a large vendor with capabilities in data science, research and artificial intelligence can open up a lot of doors that aren’t available to us now.”